Peter Steiner has drawn a cartoon. In the cartoon it is seen that a dog is typing something on a computer. Then it looks to his friend , another dog, and says "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog".
Today, even after 19 years of this cartoon, it still holds the same significance as it had on 1993. Even on this days there are lots of people who fake their identity on internet. There are a number of incidents of either husbands or wives have cheated their partners by making fake IDs and having romantic online relationships with outsiders using those identities. Also there are many cases, specially at various dating websites, where many people have been cheated by fake identities.
Now-a-days, Facebook is a very widely used social networking website. There are thousands fake IDs on Facebook mostly as girls. Many are cheated by those fake IDs. There are numerous incidents where some real person falls for a girl where the girl's ID actually belongs to another male. In such cases, that person is cheated as the fake girl demands gifts or calling cards etc and he meets her demands to remain loyal to her. There is also another form of cheating, where a person is blackmailed by his or her photos and videos captured by another person while intimated chatting with him or her.
There are many pitfalls while using internet. One should be real careful while sharing his information and pictures over internet. Some accept friend requests from persons they do not know, to increase number of friends since some people think it is prestigious to have many more friends and followers. This may lead to a very dangerous result. Some of the unknown friends could be fake IDs. They collect information and pictures of the person as well as their timeline events shared time to time. And using those information and pictures, they create more fake IDs. These IDs are very hard to figure as fake, since they provide stolen information and pictures of a real person on those. These stolen pictures ( mainly girls are the victims) are used in various dating or even worse porn websites.
Sometimes I find explicit contents shared by some of my friends who in their normal state of mind would never have shared those. I am sure some of you also have more or less same experience like me. Later when I contact them personally to know the reason for those explicit content sharing, they tells me that their IDs have been hacked. This may be the result of either of the two possibilities. One, using password too easy to hack like your birth-date or something common like 'abcd' or 'qwerty' etc. And two, by logging in to account in a public computer and leave without signing off. When we log in to our accounts from a computer, we often overlook an option named "keep me logged in". This is an option to keep logged in even after the browser is closed. In some websites this option normally remains checked. That means, if you do not leave the box unchecked while logging in from a public computer, you will remain logged on till next sign out even after you have closed the browser and left the workstation. To prevent this kind of ID hack, experts recommend using passwords with combination of both alphabetic characters and numbers, as well as to get into a habit of changing passwords on regular basis.
Social networking websites are powerful tools since thousands of people remain connected. Any manipulated picture or sensitive information could be enough to cause public chaos. So, before posting any sensitive picture or information it is really important to be sure of its genuineness and to be aware of the after effect.
Facebook and other popular social networking sites have increased security level to prevent identity theft. We have to be careful while sharing personal pictures over internet. It is not too much difficult to maintain who can access what content on our social networking website page. A little awareness can save us from embarrassments and lots of odd situations. Also, unknown people must not be added as contact or friend, no matter how attractive he or she looks in his or her profile picture. This is very important to prevent your confidential information to go the hands of a fraud.
Photo Courtesy: Peter Steiner (collected from internet).
