Having spent most of the time on Internet, social networking is very obvious. While exploring some profiles of friends and some friends of friends I happened to land on some of the celebrity profiles. Though m’ not a big fan of celebrities, but celebrities are celebrities after all, and it urges sometime to know about them if they’re near to you.
Well, same happened to me, so I got into the celebrity profiles. One profile I’d spent more time on was a very well known local model, so I knew a little about her earlier as well. Profile of her, however, seemed fake to me, and something that came in my mind at first instance was nothing other than “Identity theft”. Discussed it with friends concluded that how come a busiest celebrity can be so active on social network, but it’s mobile world so anything can happen.
Well, this celebrity story was over and out from my mind after a week, but not the Identity theft itself. I kept on finding more about Identity theft and have come up with the fact that “Identity theft is the biggest threat to Web 2.0”.
Identity theft is the biggest threat to Web 2.0 because it’s the biggest and speedily spreading internet crime. According to a research conducted by Gartner, average 28.5 people are becoming victims of identity theft each minute. In 2001, the rate of growth of identity theft was 11% to 20% and it grew upto 80% in 2002 and in 2005 it was 700%. [Source: Identity Theft Resource Center]
The research classifies the identity theft into two types, i.e. true-name identity theft and synthetic identity fraud. The first one is one in which the criminals use credentials of an actual person or business and this stands only 10% to 15% of the total cases while the other one is based on fabricated data and stands 85% to 90% of the internet fraud cases.
Identity theft affects not only individuals but also business and social groups. From Lori Drew’s Myspace case [a 49 years old woman created a false Myspace account in the name of a 16 years old boy, intending to get information from daughter’s friend “MTM” about their relationship. Later the fictitious online relationship got ugly and to end up all this "Josh" broke up with MTM and the girl committed suicide] to online phishing attacks there are hundreds of different situations whereby people suffer. Social Networks are likely to be more vulnerable to identity theft risks, as grabbing user information and creating false accounts on these networks is none too difficult.
It’s a proven fact that technology and innovations have benefited crimes along with the society for betterment and improved lifestyle. But, since there’s always a room for betterment, so is this in the case of Web 2.0. When we talk about communities, user generated content, direct access to the end user and blah blah, one question that’s of equal importance for everyone is “How to maintain your true identity?”
Moderated content and maintaining online reputation systems can resolve this very issue, but almost every social network is after more and more growth in terms of userbase, and there’re some with million of users, i.e Facebook , Orkut, Myspace etc, and it’s nearly impossible for them to keep a check on each and every activity within their online premises. Maintaining privacy and other policies at social network’s end and realizing social responsibility at users’ end does make a difference, but looking at the number of identity theft cases in each minute, the difference seems greater.
Having internet law may be a solution, but which country’s law t will be, or will one country’s law be acceptable in other? International Internet Law may be….! Well that’s a long debate and the speed with which technologies change is not the speed with which laws get updated….!
Finally I found something of my interest and thought that it might help combating the issue. it’s “Web 3.0”. It’ll hopefully be more efficient than Web 2.0, when we’ll have all OpenID and intelligent web [Semantic Web] based applications and websites. With OpenID when user will have same credentials for many websites, he’ll have better control. But the threat of identity theft remains there, when a normal user can do all this, a cyber criminal can also.
So my question is, “we’re on the way to make the web more intelligent, but how can we make the web that intelligent to identify the cyber crimes like identity theft?”
and that’s it. No design, No formatting nothing else……………” CEO’s Words
