Online Identity Theft: Collision of Two Worlds

I always thought a person’s online life and real life should be separated. I neither use my real name nor give any personal information to any social networking sites, and I write my personal blog under a false name. For me, this caution and guard online was mostly for a sense of escaping from reality and expressing myself more candidly without all the judgment from people I know in real life. But I never thought there is also an added benefit to this: online security.

Identity theft crimes are on the rise continuously. According to 2007 Identity Fraud Survey by Javelin Research, 8.4 million Americans became the victims of identity theft in 2006; especially for young adults, age 18 to 24, the rate is almost twice as other age groups. This mostly because the leading targets for hackers and identity thieves now are social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Use Facebook as an example, the vast amount of public data on Facebook make it much easier to impersonate, damage, and even steal identity. There are several tactics used by identity thieves to obtain Facebook users’ personal information, common ones are using phishing sites that fool users into revealing their credentials, linking website or email that leads user to a web page that install malicious software that can secretly collects their personal data, some of the malicious software record all the keyboard inputs, and in more interesting cases, the criminals become “friends” with users as a way to gain more access to personal information, this tactic although sounds harmless enough compare to the others, in a study by the anti-virus software company Sophos, they found that 41% of people accepted friend requests from Freddi Staur, a made-up identity that is based on a plastic frog. More specifically, Freddi invited 200 random Facebook users to its friend. 87 out of 200 accepted and 82 of those gave up personal data, such as birthday, places of birth, employers' names, addresses, photographs of family and friends, work resumes, and in some cases, the user's mother's maiden name. This study is quite revealing of the low self-protection of the young generation.

As one of highlighted importance of privacy in Marx’s article Privacy and Technology, "the ability to control information about the self is linked to the dignity of the individual, self-respect and the sense of personhood," and this is just a fundamental reason for protecting our privacy online. We need to be more aware of the information we are putting online, and realize the impact that the information may have on our lives both online and offline.

Someone Else: A Different Identity Online

Click the picture to watch the entire program


As we are getting more connected to the internet, the benefits and convenience are easy to see, and the issues are starting to surface. In current years, more internet related news are popping up more frequently, so much so that PBS Frontline did an program, Growing Up Online, specifically addressing and uncovering some of the issues. In the program, one of segment is Self Expression, Trying On New Identities, in which features a girl, Jessica Hunter in real life and Autumn Edows in cyberspace. Her story chiefly is that Jessica always felt she was an outsider that never fit the mold, but at age fourteen, online modeling brought her confidence, fans, and fame. She wholeheartedly embraced her new online identity, but once her pictures were discovered by the school authorities and were deemed offensive and inappropriate, Autumn had to be deleted and Jessica was left to face the consequences.

In her interview, the thing that I found most fascinating was the way she hid her online identity completely, “I would lie my ass off just to keep my identity sacred,” which led me question that is Jessica protecting Autumn, her online identity, from reality? Or is Jessica protecting her fantasy world from reality? And why wouldn't her identity be sacred even if it is exposed to her real life? Is letting her parents and friends to know her other identity ruin the purpose of it? And what ultimately is the purpose of her online identity? From this point, Jessica explained further, “I didn’t feel like myself, but I liked the fact that I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like someone completely different.” This quote of hers reminds me the feeling that I had before and I think a lot of others also felt at least once in life: I wish I was someone else. More specifically, someone that is “better” than me. In Jessica’s case, Autumn was popular, she had hundreds of online friends, compare to Jessica’s real life, Autumn seemed to be the better one.

Surprisingly, it may be true to some extend, in the article Granting Personality to a Virtual Identity describes online identity as “usually (in most cases) embellished to make the physical person appear more intelligent, sexier, skinnier or bolder. The personality chosen usually embellishes what the person already has or aspires to be.” In a sense that Jessica just presented a better version of herself, and the big difference is she presented it online. Maybe if she tries to present a better version of herself in real life, she might make friends and be happier, but we know it is not that easy to change people’s perception about you, a clean start is pretty much not possible, but online she could freely express herself with control over the negative judgments from others, for example the hurtful comments can be deleted by her. This control over one's identity and interactions with others is a incredibly liberating experience that is quite unique to this medium.