

The fake Facebook profile I could not get removed - noahc
http://www.salon.com/technology/facebook/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/02/01/my_fake_facebook_profile&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%2520Newsletter%2520%2528Not%2520Premium%2529_7_30_110

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philk
She's incredibly melodramatic:

 _It made my heart bleed._

 _A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't
follow conversations. Words swam._

 _Reading the profile was like plunging into an icy pond from such a high
distance it felt as if I'd slammed into a wall. And then the sensation of
drowning._

I can't help but think there are people out there dealing with real, serious
problems who bear them with much more dignity.

~~~
anonym9
I'm the victim of a stalker, and I can say that it does tear up your life,
feeling so powerless, but I still wish the author could have used a simpler,
less affected tone. Even though I can Absolutely relate, and I even feared for
my life, her approach didn't evoke much of my sympathy!

------
_delirium
This seems to be becoming more common, and Facebook as far as I can tell has
no active process for it.

A professor I know had a phisher create a duplicate profile with the
information/photo cloned from his, who then sent friend requests to all his
friends, which a bunch of people reflexively accepted thinking maybe he got a
new profile or something. Then people (esp. people over 30) were _really_
confused over the next two weeks or so about which profile was the real one
and which was the fake one, though I don't think anybody fell for the phishing
scam. To avoid getting the messages the phisher started sending, some people
just defriended both profiles!

Facebook didn't respond even after dozens of people clicked the report-this-
profile button. Eventually it got taken down only when a friend-of-a-friend of
his who works at Facebook promised to pass on the information to the right
person.

~~~
TheAmazingIdiot
Considering the person is of some renown, She could have hired an attorney and
had a nice amount of money from Facebook.

I'm thinking of $1 million damages, with $100 million putative for not having
an access to challenge and dispute these kinds of identity theft and character
assassination.

So my question... Why wasn't "Lawyer Up" the first thing she thought of?

~~~
slapshot
> Why wasn't "Lawyer Up" the first thing she thought of?

It's not clear that a lawyer would matter. Facebook would plead immunity under
CDA 230 [1]. Facebook would claim that CDA 230 grants complete immunity to
hosts for user-created content, and that the fake profile is user-created
content.

The legal theory "you should have made your website better" has yet to gain a
lot of legal traction. Maybe it should, but it hasn't yet.

[1] Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996

~~~
enjo
Yep, in particular I recall a case involving AOL in which a man claimed
negligence on the part of AOL for not policing their forums, allowing for
people to defame him. The court ruled that providing that type of policing
would have turned AOL into a publisher, which is exactly what 230 protects
against.

I think the same thing would apply here.

~~~
joe_the_user
But would it be the same thing?

Facebook claims users used their real names. That's pretty specific. If they
are flagrantly ignoring a violation of their own claims, their legal standing
seem different than an entity merely transmitting data.

------
Udo
It's overly melodramatic, yes, but that's not the most important thing wrong
with this article.

> _The Internet makes it easy to casually carve up real people in some cartoon
> world. A drive-by shooting, a stab in the dark. A fast, vicious punch to the
> reputation. Easy to do damage. And awfully hard to repair._

Nice call for internet censorship by the way, these are coming up more often
recently. But that's not author's main failure here either. Instead the
glaringly obvious problem with this whole viewpoint is her alarming ignorance
of how easily more fake profiles could appear all over the place. For a
borderline Luddite it may seem miraculous, but it's really not hard to publish
disparaging content about a person. If someone really hates you, they will do
something like this again and it takes very little effort. For victims hitting
the "report abuse" button is always a good step, but other than that a healthy
sense of detachment is clearly called for. Celebrities (I use the word loosely
here) who are that prone to collapse from mind-bogglingly childish
psychological assaults should probably not be on the web at all period.

------
markkat
That was difficult to read. That situation was a bummer, not soul-stealing. I
wonder if the author understands how self-absorbed and rantish that article
sounded to so many readers.

I think she severely overestimated the gravity of the situation.

------
jrockway
"The country they're in may have laws against this very thing."

Why not tell us the country and what laws there are?

The reality is that anyone can create any web page they want, and you'll never
be able to find them. You need to figure out some other strategy to manage
your identity, like advertising to your fanbase what your real Facebook
profile is.

Personally, when I see something on the Internet (social profile or
otherwise), I usually assume it's fake. It boggles my mind that other people
don't do this. And that's the real problem.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Public/private keypairs could help here, actually. A space in the profile to
post your public key, as well as a short line of text, and then the same line
encrypted with your private key.

Of course, I guess a fake account could generate their own keypair, and it
would be hard to prove to the internet at large whose keypair truly belongs to
you.

~~~
jackolas
Just get it signed, twitter's verified accounts are kind of like this but
without any key exchanging involved. Verification is easy compared to getting
people to use PKI stuff.

~~~
thwarted
_Verification is easy compared to getting people to use PKI stuff._

I wonder what kind of inroads Facebook could make concerning public knowledge
of crypto by allowing people to post cryptographically verified entries using
an SSL client cert.

------
gohat
Yes, it is a bit melodramatic.

I think the key message of this article is to realize how much power big
internet companies have gained over our lives. And how they don't find dealing
with problems efficient, so just rely on automated systems that can greatly
fail people.

------
mike-cardwell
I know this is immensely geeky and of no use to the average Facebook user, but
my Facebook profile "about information" is PGP signed so people (who know how)
can verify that it belongs to me:

<https://www.facebook.com/imike3> (You can only see this URL when logged in)

FireGPG users can auto detect the signed text in the page and have it verify
inline in the page.

Just paste the signed text into "cat|gpg --verify" and done.

I mention my profile ID and username inside the signed text to prevent replay
attacks where someone simply copies my signed text and adds it to their own
profile.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Before any smart alec points it out, the "cat|" is redundant in the above.
"gpg --verify" is sufficient. My HN profile is also PGP signed.

------
nowarninglabel
_"Emotions roiled, all dark. The depth of my anger scared me. I wanted them
hurt, scared, suffering. I wanted them to pay"_

There are some serious problems with this woman that she found her entire life
ruined, and provoked to wanting violent revenge, over a kid putting up a fake
profile with some sexual pejoratives.

------
D3lt4
This story was a little too dramatic.

------
Cadsby
Yes, the writing style was nauseatingly dramatic, but the callous, dismissive
tone of most of the commenters is telling.

How would you feel if someone creating a profile/website accusing you of being
a child molester? No matter how crudely designed and obvious a fake it was, a
lot of people, many of whom you might now, would believe it. These kinds of
things don't just wash off and go away.

~~~
D3lt4
Some of the points she made were quite good and somewhat scary, but it shows
pretty much what facebook has been this whole time, irresponsible, whether it
is with privacy or scenarios such as this one.

------
afterburner
What contributed the most to the powerlessness I believe is the lack of
customer support from Facebook. No doubt having half a billion customers makes
this quite the challenge to say the least, but that lack of recourse is what
amplifies these feelings.

~~~
vesrin
But you are not a customer since you don't pay for the service, you are a user
- so it's user support, not customer support.

The customers are the people/companies who buy ads to finance Facebook.

Why would they bother that much with the user's problems - it's not like you
can easily quit anyway.

~~~
afterburner
So what's your point? Never open a Facebook account? It would be a logical
response, one which would impact Facebook customers. So would, say, having
login problems and not being able to log in to see all those ads. It seems
user problems can impact the customer after all.

------
jackolas
Unearned income is not lost money. I stopped reading right there.

~~~
biot
While you're technically correct, incidents like this can be actionable under
tort law and damages claimed to compensate for income not earned.

If you always earn $10,000 a day in profit from customers entering your shop,
and someone barricades the entrance to your shop for one day, I don't think
you'd have a hard time in court showing that you "lost" $10,000 that day.

~~~
drdaeman
This is quite an incorrect analogy, as in this case nobody prevented anyone
from buying the books.

Comparsion to a store, earning $10K every day, then "losing" 90% because
someone spreads a gossip that your store sells very low quality stuff, would
be much more appropriate. Just an old plain defamation.

------
A1kmm
If someone uploaded a photo of her from her website, presumably one she held
the copyright in, wouldn't she have been better off trying to get the
photograph taken down on the grounds that it is pirated?

I'm sure Facebook responds to DMCA takedown requests reasonably promptly - and
once a human is aware of the account being a fake, they would undoubtedly want
to take the whole profile down too.

------
sp4rki
This was ridiculously painful to read. Melodramatic would be an
understatement, and for what it's worth, this article has automatically made
me decide that if I ever come across anything this person produces, I'm not
buying it.

------
ttttannebaum
"A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping. I couldn't
follow conversations. Words swam. Worst of all, I couldn't write. Writing is
what I do. It's how I make my way in the world, how I help put food on the
table, a roof over our heads, paid for the shoes on our kids' feet and the
education they've taken out the door."

Jesus Christ, fly to Palo Alto and storm into the headquarters yourself if it
comes to that.

------
corin_
I really hope this never happens to her again, not because I particularly care
about her feelings, but because I wouldn't want anyone to have to read that
essay of whining again.

------
georgieporgie
Moral: sign up with popular social networking sites and keep an eye on your
Google rank.

I had friend with the same name as a porn star. Luckily, the porn star was in
the downward portion of her career arc.

