Reputation Management, Internet Privacy, and Social Media Quick Hits

Street Gangs Flocking to Twitter and Facebook

This AP article describes how street gangs across the United States have been increasing their use of popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to organize crimes as well as boast about drug deals, shootings, and other illegal activities. The article touches on how law enforcement is effectively monitoring gang-related social media activity and using it to make arrests.

Celebrity Doppelganger Trend Against Facebook TOS?

A popular trend on Facebook may be in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. The viral trend, which has no definite origin, is called Doppelganger Week and involves Facebook users changing their profile images to those of celebrities whom they think they look like. As this article from CNET notes, however, posting copyright protected photos is against the rules and Facebook reserves the right to take them down. At this point, it’s unlikely that any doppelganger celeb on Facebook is in danger of having their picture taken down.

Mozilla Experimenting with Data Privacy Icons

According to CNET, the Mozilla Foundation, which operates the popular Internet browser Firefox, is in the process of developing “a standard set of colored icons to reveal how data-protective–or how intrusive–Web sites are.” The goal of the project is to help web users quickly identify a web site’s data collection policies and overall privacy. Other recent attempts to develop a symbol for data mining have launched recently, including one spearheaded by the Future of Privacy Forum, which demonstrates how important this issue is.

Below is an early example of Mozilla’s ideas.

Does Your Boss Have to Be Honest With You About Employee Policies?

In the US News & World Report, Lewis Maltby discusses Quon v. Arch Wireless, a pending case before the United States Supreme Court. The case revolves around a government employer’s right to monitor an employee’s communications, in this case a police department monitoring a police officer’s pager. What is interesting about the case is that an employer’s right to monitor its employees is well established. The sticking point in Quon is whether an employer must keep their promise about a policy.

In this case, the police officer was told by his superior that if he went over his messaging limit because of personal messages, the department wouldn’t investigate so long as he paid the difference. Although Sgt. Quon did pay the difference everytime he went over, his commanding officer escalated the problem anyway, which eventually led to the revelation of Quon’s private (or so he thought) messages. Is it fair that Quon was told one thing and then given another? The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit didn’t think so, and now we’ll see if the Supreme Court agrees.

Girl Fights Spreading Online and Offline

This article from the Early Show discusses how fights between teen girls online can escalate to physical confrontations offline, and vice versa. The danger of the real world and the cyber world mixing in this way has led many child safety advocates to worry about a corresponding increase in cyberbullying. The key to stopping this behavior online and offline is to teach proper conflict prevention, but inattentive adults and limited resources in school have made this a difficult proposition.

Boy, 12, and Girl, 13, Arrested and Charged for Sexting

According to this article in the Chicago Tribune, two Valparaiso, Indiana children have been arrested and charged with child exploitation and possession of child pornography for sending sexually exlicit text messages to each other, i.e. sexting. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen teens arrested because of sexting, and it probably won’t be the last. Not only is the sexting trend a nightmare for parents, who worry about their kids’ safety, but it is a real problem for prosecutors, who must make difficult decisions about how to interpret existing criminal laws.

Becoming a Rothschild Through the Magic of the Web

This very interesting article from Valleywag talks about Stefan Roberts, a regular guy who semi-successfully used the Internet to pretend to be the super-wealthy (and fictitious) Stefan de Rothschild. Faking his Internet presence with numerous websites, as well as Huffington Post blog, Roberts duped several press outlets, including the Washington Post, into reporting a story that he had donated $2.5 million to Haiti relief efforts.

Ironically, the very thing that helped Roberts build his fake persona also helped bring him down. In an attempt to legitimize his claims, Roberts set up multiple Wikipedia entries, which were quickly flagged by the Wikipedia community, leading to his eventual unraveling.

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