Connect with care
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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Internet networking sites offer unprecedented scope for self-expression and virtual ‘hanging out’ but serious risks are surfacing.
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The highway to Cyberia makes a thrilling ride; no speed limits, few road blocks, no rules of the road. The death of Mumbai teenager Adnan Patrawala may be a pointer to some of the risks attached to the Internet. The enthusiasm of lay users in this &#
8216;connected’ era — their number is likely to cross one billion by year end — has seen the Internet evolve in directions and at a pace that is already a cause for concern.
“Only connect!” said E.M. Forster (Howard’s End) in an earlier unconnected era. The ‘young and restless’ (and a lot of slower, older people, it seems) have taken this advice, harnessing the ability of t
he Internet to provide everyone a private “room with a view” that can be both personal and public.
Interaction on the web
For want of a better term, they are called social networking sites — websites which encourage you to virtually ‘meet’ and interact with people (friends and strangers alike), who are believed to share similar tastes and interests.
The interaction can happen through open chats, online communities, and even sharing of personal photo albums and videos. The sites grew out of another recent phenomenon, blogging, or the creation of sites where an individual can express views or post a diary of activities.
Millions of bloggers and a lot of non-bloggers, seem to have migrated to social networking portals, where they can find dozens sharing their exact likes and dislikes. The best known of these sites in India seems to be Orkut. Other popular social networking services, albeit more specialised, are Facebook, which began as an online personal online photo album; MySpace, the biggest of them all with 50 million members; TagWorld and Hi5.
Many social networkers have made their space a cyber combination of a personal diary, club and yearbook… cherishing the opportunity for candid and unsupervised self-expression.
More often than not, an Orkut or Facebook entry reveals a facet that might come as a revelation to the owner’s parents, detailing fads, fears and fashions that they might not like to share with “oldies”. But one question rarely addressed is, “How far do you go?”
In a famous cartoon from New Yorker magazine, two dogs operate a PC while their human owners are out of the house. One dog tells the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog”.
It captured a key feature of the Internet — anonymity and the ability to hide who you are. No wonder that, in addition to millions of innocent, naive youngsters, social networking sites are also ‘used’ by predators and antisocial elements, looking for likely prey.
In the U.S., where social networking was spawned by school and college students, many learnt the hard way that sharing personal information online can have unintended consequences. Parents, encouraged by the hype to provide unsupervised Net access for the best motives, suddenly found that the persons behind innocent names could be child pornographers, sexual deviants or (in the suggested scenario of the Adnan case) kidnappers looking for a rich kid.
Indiscriminate postings have also landed students in trouble when they applied for a job a few years later. Many employers include a thorough search in cyberspace using every known search engine to ‘dig out’ the candidate’s indiscretions. One fact of Internet life has not changed. There is no “delete” button. Once files or facts are uploaded, there is no knowing where copies lurk.
When several sex crimes seemed to originate at postings on one or other of the social networking sites, the National School Boards Association in the U.S. undertook a study funded by Microsoft, Newscorp (owners of MySpace), and Verizon Communications, the largest Internet providers in the U.S. The association, which represents nearly 100,000 school boards in the U.S., released its report on August 8. The study, which surveyed students between nine and 17 years as well as parents and teachers, generally debunked the assumption that social networking sites were breeding grounds for sexual predators.
The study found that only 0.08 per cent of the students surveyed had met a person they had first encountered online in real life; four per cent said they had uncomfortable conversations on the network; three per cent said such unwelcome strangers made repeated attempts to communicate with them and two per cent said such cyber strangers tried to convert the contact into a face-to-face meeting. The report concluded that a number of students who had a negative experience with social networking formed a small minority. On the other hand, the report said over 96 per cent of students with online access used one of these social networking services.
Other cases
The report is being widely cited particularly by those who champion the idea of social networking, but that does not drive away the dangers. The Adnan case was preceded by a few other instances in India where the investigating police tracked links to social networking sites.
In March, the Pune police, after a highly publicised raid on a party where youngsters were freely imbibing drugs, said that such events were organised through social networking sites.
Earlier in the year, a schoolgirl complained that her profile had been tampered with. She was made out to be sexually “loose” and her address and telephone number had been added without her permission. An air hostess told a Delhi court that someone had maligned her character while opening a site in her name.
Social sites are mirrors to society, reflecting the good, bad and ugly aspects. It may now be up to the user to exercise caution; since if one voluntarily sacrifices privacy, one also surrenders the protection that comes with it.
Was his social networking activity responsible for Adnan’s kidnapping and death? We shall never know. He was known to network with a number of ‘friends’ through his page on the Web.
The episode might well move the “networkers”, egged on by their parents and well wishers, to exercise greater caution in how much they want to put on public display.
We would never live with the doors of our homes wide open. Why do it in the virtual world of the Internet?
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