There are Creeps Exploiting the Internet

There's this blog I visit regularly - Fireflies In The Cloud - apart from his dry sense of humor, he puts his photoshop skills to good use by providing visual illustrations which can be quite hilarious.

Anyway, while reading his blog, I came across the story of Michael Crooks. I thought he was such a creep and sore loser that I decided to blog about it. His story serves as a good reminder of what can happen when you send personal information over the net to strangers you know nothing about.

As the exchange of information becomes more common over the internet, people are led to a false sense of security, and many times forget that personal information, pictures and videos posted on the web, and/or sent to people can be easily posted up on YouTube, on the forums, etc. without your consent to a very public community. And some of the channels to which you send your personal information can seem so innocent.

Michael Crook is a guy who put up a fake identity as a 19 year old female student on dating sites in 5 states. With the promise of casual sex with any man, single or married, he extracts information about these men who are looking for a casual sexual relationship, and posts them up his site with their real names, occupation, yada yada yada, and even the names of their wives. That was how he found his place to "stardom" on the Fox News Channel, after which his picture on Fox News was posted all over the internet. He proceeded to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices to all the sites who put up his picture, ordering them to remove it claiming that he had the copyright of the picture, which in fact belonged to Fox who had given free use of his picture. Read all about it here.

So next time, when someone asks you for personal information or a picture of yourself - think twice, think hard. The person at the other end might be a pervert who could broadcast all your personal details to anyone and everyone - your enemy at work, your ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, your parents, etc. Or they could photoshop your photos and send it out as a misrepresentation of where you were and what you were doing...