Jason Fortuny isn’t a cop, nor does he play one on TV. But, apparently after staying at a Holiday Inn, he acted like a moral cop a few weeks back in setting up a web-based sting operation to expose a bunch of cheating spouses. This is old news, but I’m taking a break from my intensive week of project work — which normally would have been reserved for watching the Bears-Vikings game, had it been televised here — to clean up some blog post wannabes sitting in my drafts list.
I originally read some thoughts about it a day or so after Fortuny’s sting was reported. Seems this thirty-something posed on CraigsList as a women looking for some bondage and received assorted sorted details — some in picture form — from a bunch of people looking to help. Jason then posted the information on a web site, included some names, business contact information and the aforementioned photos.
Woo-Hoo! say some; You Are Evil, say most. Fortuny’s LiveJournal blog is still running, but by the look of the long list of comments starting on September 8, it probably caused some sys admin headaches for a while. He’s still getting comments, albeit at a slower pace. Fortuny immortalized his 15 minutes with a video interview on YouTube. Right or wrong (and stay tuned for the wave of civil lawsuits holding him responsible for lost wages and emotional trauma once the impact of what he’s done reaches climax), the blogosphere was a’talkin’ in September, and his “experiment” brings up a couple of very real Internet issues.
One is information access. There are many things that separate Fortuny’s stunt from a recent post by Chris on FaceBook privacy. Chris didn’t dupe anyone into publishing information; he showed an example of how to get to hidden information using public tools. He didn’t publish anything not already accessible by anyone using the site. Chris won’t get sued, and probably won’t get four pages worth of comments for his trouble. But will that distinction matter to Laura/Heather/Christy/Kelley if information they expected to be private got to people they don’t want to know it? Is Chris ethically culpable for the disclosure? Am I for linking to it? What about the company providing the privacy? The fact is there probably isn’t any information that gets out of the darkest corners of your subconscious that isn’t accessible through networking. Sometimes the network is computer-assisted; other times it is simple human-powered, water-cooler gossip. The only way anyone has a chance to know something you don’t want to them to know is to get that thought out of your head. After that, it no longer belongs to you.
That brings up the second big issue: Trust. Societies are as strong as their ability to overcome the effect of the weakest link. In a worst-case scenario, Fortuny’s antic made everyone think twice before disclosing any information. That also may be the best-case scenario, because people will be thinking more than was evident in the swingers who used company email and sent identifiable photos. But what about the interactions that rely on trust? E-commerce already has it’s legacy issues with getting and storing credit card info, and with selling data to spam companies. What about supports and services? Do you think a battered wife is going to open up to an online community of other abused women if she thinks some poser is going to share those conversations with the rest of the world? (That was the problem of Tiffanie’s capstone last spring.)
