Nerve Endings Firing Away

Everyone is a dog on the Internet — was an oft-repeated warning in the heydays of online chatting. Anybody who could type in random keystrokes and had an oversized (read unrequited) sex drive was on the umpteen chat sites, occupying precious bandwidth. When blogs arrived, it was considered a mature medium and tired of the entire chatting scene, I preferred to remain anonymous. After all, although there is no visual connection, there are umpteen clues on my identity and I don’t try too hard either. But after the Plain Layne episodes, no one would have thought that stealing someone’s identity would exist in the “more mature” world of blogs.

If you have seen the recent Citibank commercials on identity theft, you are definitely psyched. But what if no financial harm is done? Is it still creepy to have someone steal your identity, as in visual images? To have your personal pictures online is almost exposing yourself to the world’s evils. Flickr is a great tool but on the downside, it puts your personal pictures out there for everyone to see; some of whom may not have good intentions. I constantly fear for the people who put up pictures of their kids on their blog (Page 3 fears, if you know what I mean). 

Amanda Doerty who calls herself as the Hot Abercrombie Chick in the blogosphere world obviously had her share of fans. Until Hengineer discovered that this “Amanda” person had, in fact flicked Marie’s pictures and was literally stealing her visual identity (a pretty one too!) [via Foreign Dispatches]. I am not even sure if that blogger is a male or a female. Stealing someone’s “visually attractive identity” to attract more hits? Can this be the new form of plagiarism to hit the blogosphere, after the one that Amit discovered? Check out both the hyperlinks to be amazed at the sicko’s cheap stunts.

I shudder to think if anyone would do that to me (would have to be positively insane though). But I am definitely not putting my personal pictures of family and friends out in the public domain. All my online photo albums are password-protected and I hope you do the same too. Especially the ones with children in their family.

UPDATE: It seems that the Hot Abercrombie Chick scandal had a longer history than I thought. Also Shanti writes about a loser guy posing as a hot Libertarian chick (is that an oxymoron?) The guy sure was a moron. What say, Cartel members?