“Facebook, an endlessly cool place for so many people, becomes at the same time a goldmine for identity theft and dating — unfortunately, without the user’s control. But that’s the very nature of Facebook and social media in general. If we start to play with the concepts of identity theft and dating, we should be able to unveil how fragile a virtual identity given to a proprietary platform can be.”
Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder, made his name at Harvard in 2003 by scraping the names and photos of fellow classmates off school servers to feed a system called FaceMash. With the photos, Zuckerberg created a controversial system that pitted one co-ed against another, by allowing others to vote on which one was better looking.
"How does a unknown dating site, with the absurd intention of destroying Facebook, launch with 250,000 member profiles on the first day? Simple. .. an approach taken by two provocateurs who launched LovelyFaces.com this week, with profiles - names, locations and photos - scraped from publicly accessible Facebook pages."
The Face of Tomorrow is a concept for a series of photographs that addresses the effects of globalization on identity. .. The Face of Tomorrow attempts to find this face by taking photographs of the current inhabitants and compositing their faces to create a typical face. What we get is a new person - a mix of all the people in that city. A face that doesn't exist right now, but a face, it seems, of someone quite real.
"Thankfully, there are ways to restore your online reputation. While you might think that reducing your internet presence is the way to go, you'd be wrong. The key to managing your reputation is to spend more time online, not less. The advocates of this approach argue that polishing your online persona could soon join healthy eating and exercise in your arsenal of everyday life-maintenance chores. So how exactly do you go about it?"
"As people share more information about themselves online, the internet, in effect, has created a public transcript of consciousness -- storing our thoughts, locations, social lives and memories in data warehouses all over the world. This has enabled technological advances and shaped our social interactions. It's also really freaked some people out. "
"If you've ever visited a website that handles even the smallest bit of your personal information, there's a good chance (hopefully) that it's asked you to read through a privacy policy or two. Rather than pour over the details, many of us simply click on 'I AGREE!' and proceed with using the application. Even the companies and websites involved understand this and make it as easy as possible to satisfy lawyers as well as users.
What's the harm in essentially ignoring that privacy policy? While the majority of the time it's harmless, there are some ne'er-do-wells that may gather your personal information and sell it to marketers, advertisers, or spammers. While terrible, it's not unheard of."
From ACMA Cybersmart this very catchy video has stats on what students are doing online as well as lots of targetted advice on what to do to prevent problems and what to do when problems arise. It also contains visual links to the support docs that Cybersmart can provided.
"Connect.ed is an innovative, self-paced cybersafety education program offered by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) as part of Cybersmart.
Connect.ed provides teachers with the flexibility of a self paced environment to learn about current online behaviours of students, potential risks involved in these activities, a teacher's and school's duty of care and the appropriate tools, resources and strategies to help students to have safe and positive experiences online."