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.