Have you even been a victim of identity theft? In the financial sense, it’s a very unpleasant thing – someone uses your credentials to make credit card purchases, take out loans and generally pretty much ravage your financial standing. There are laws and safeguards protection against such criminal acts, however, so these things are becoming increasingly easy to deal with by victims.
What about online identities, however? What if someone pretends to be you online and, say destroys your reputation? Depending on how such doppelganger accounts are used, incidents may end up in criminal cases.
We’ve recently stumbled upon rare case of self-cyberbullying, which resulted in the offender and the victim ending up in jail – because they were the same person. What happened was a citizen of Great Britain decided to bully herself from a fake Facebook account – a decision which has landed her in prison for 20 months. This winter a British court has discovered that the 24 year old Michelle Chapman created actually not one, but several social media accounts, impersonating her father and her stepmother. British newspaper The Independent reported that she “sent herself hundreds of abusive messages of 'very unpleasant sexual nature' before reporting them to the police.” Apparently she wasn’t a fan of the new family arrangement. After she has ‘trolled’ herself for a significant amount of time, Michelle decided she couldn’t take it any longer and called the police on her abusers. You know, her dad and stepmom. The police generally takes such allegations very seriously, especially if there was ‘evidence’ in the form of Facebook messages. Long story short, after arresting the victim’s/bully’s family members the police eventually discovered the truth and punished the culprit accordingly.
Of course, things like these are, thankfully, not commonplace. Although instances of fake celebrity accounts, fake accounts of someone from school or work or what have you sometimes do pop up and sometimes they fool some people with somewhat unpleasant results. In any case, as far Russians are concerned, it’s possible there will soon be a law protecting internet users from ‘online clones’. Alexey Chepa, Deputy chairman of the Science Committee of the State Duma proposed blocking complete websites and pages which infringe on ‘personal non-property rights’ – in other words, their personal information. The new bill will grant those citizens whose name is used online illegally the right to file a claim, in which they will have to provide proof of their identity being misused as well as their proof of identity. The agency entrusted with regulating this will be Roskomnadzor – Russia’s telecom watchdog, who also maintains blacklists of websites with ‘taboo’ information – child exploitation, drug advocacy and suicide and encouragement, and acts as the go-to anti-piracy enforcer. The supervisor will have to contact the web host or website owner to block offending accounts or block it off using other means. Chepa provided an example, of such fakes incurring not only reputational, but also material damages. Quotes “Suddenly someone’s ‘clone’ appears on a social network or forum and communicates with their friends, spreads photos, asks for money and instigates conflicts or even blackmails the real person” end quote Interestingly, Roskomnadzor did not support the bill, saying that the law ‘on personal data’ already protects users, and adding that social networks already prohibit fake accounts. Personally, I don’t think it really does work right now, as I have witnessed aforementioned behavior go unpunished. What do you think?
