Sitting in a café yesterday, I found myself sandwiched between two young people. Each had a laptop on the table and was connected to the Internet. As I sneaked a peak at their screens I noted that they were both using facebook. The situation made me smile: Social networking today means chatting on a computer to someone miles away and ignoring the people sitting next to you. And as I read the newspapers and caught up on the conviction of Lori Drew by a Los Angeles court on three counts of accessing a computer without authorization, I thought of just how dangerous social networking sites can be.
The Drew case is tragic and ugly in the extreme. Lori Drew, who is an adult, decided to help her 13-year-old daughter seek revenge on Megan Meier, a classmate who had taunted her. Mother and daughter, along with one of Drew’s employees created a fake mySpace profile for a 16-year-old boy they named Josh Evans. They then started a screen relationship between Josh Evans and Megan Meier. Their idea was that they would humiliate Megan by printing out all her flirtatious messages to Josh and distributing them at school. That alone is a vile idea that should have been discouraged by a responsible parent rather than aided and abetted, but it went further than that and ended in tragedy: When Drew sent a message from Josh to Megan ending the relationship and telling her “the world would be better without her”, Megan hanged herself.
This court case is the first of its kind in the US. Though Drew was cleared of the more serious crime of accessing a computer without authorization to create emotional distress, she was found guilty of the lesser charges of accessing a computer without authorization. In essence she was found guilty of violating the terms of the mySpace user agreement.
This case is frightening for a number of reasons. The most obvious and most worrying is that it has highlighted just how vulnerable youngsters are when they engage in a relationship with someone they meet on a website. For a start, there is the serious problem of fake aliases. Pedophiles are known to use fake profiles to ensnare young girls and boys. But even leaving that aside, these relationships can be emotionally dangerous. On the surface they may seem to be safely sitting at home typing on a keyboard, but in reality they may form friendships that are more powerful and more intense than conventional friendships made of regular social face-to-face interaction. Being behind a screen you do not see the facial reactions of your interlocutor. This encourages people to overshare and this makes teenagers in particular rather vulnerable. From a legal point of view the case sets an interesting precedent. Are all those people out there who have created fake profiles or who have lied in some way about themselves on social networking websites about to be prosecuted?
It used to be that the Internet was anonymous, it was part of its charm. People could surf the Internet and look at material in the privacy of their home that they may not feel comfortable doing in public. They could also post opinions and share their experiences without having their identities traced, as well as communicate with strangers without revealing who they really were. Clearly that is fine if what you are doing is innocent and harmless and dangerous if you are using the cloak of anonymity for more sinister purposes, but what is more relevant here is that people assume they are anonymous on the net when in fact they are not. Something as benign as searching on Google is not anonymous but can be traced back to you. It is something I find rather disturbing.
The issue is not so much one of anonymity as of private information inadvertently entering the public domain. This is especially the case with social networking websites. What is more worrying is that people get lulled into sharing with the world at large information which they would not verbally share with strangers. Posts and blogs can too easily become personal journals. Because they are written when alone and behind the privacy of a computer screen they can reveal our most intimate thoughts and feelings. And even when they are not intimate they can reveal too much. In the last year there have been many instances of information posted on social networking sites or on personal blogs being used by employers or authorities against their authors. Whether it is the university admissions officer who checked the mySpace profiles of applicants, or the insurance company that refused cover based on information it unearthed on a personal blog, or the employer who fired an employee for opinions expressed online.
There ought to be a simple rule of thumb for information posted online, much like being read you rights. Police officers tell you anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. When it comes to the Internet anything you write online may be read and accessed by anyone and used against you.
