Privacy and the internet

Vinnie Lauria, after a discussion about trust on the internet, recently alerted me to this recent blog on WAXY.ORG: someone posted a fake ’sex wanted’ add on Craigs list, collected and posted all the replies, in their entirety, on his website. His ruse, which extended a similar though less controversial one by Simon Owens, attracted numerous comments, largely centered around the issue of privacy; was Fortuny breaking any laws when he posted the replies and did the respondents to his advertisement have any right to expect their emails would not be published? What I found particularly striking, however was the fact that of the 62 comments posted, 94% withheld their identities using only their first names, and 61% used pseudonyms.

The internet, by allowing people to assume ‘new’ identities, tacitly encourages people to behave in ways they would otherwise be ashamed to for fear of social sanction. It is unclear to me whether this is a good thing (i.e. socially desirable) or not. On the one hand, it might allow people to ‘let of steam’ which moderates their real face to face interactions. However, as Owen and Fortuny’s experiment seems to suggest, rather than balance (an increase in activity in a virtual domain reducing the prevalence of that tendency in the real one), the internet may be altering peoples’ understanding of what is socially acceptable and what is not.

Of course this is exactly the same unresolved debate that has been going on about video games, and before that about television. As the Neil Peart (and others before him) has said “plus ca change…”.