Flash back six years ago, when just about everyone was getting a LiveJournal account and blogging about whatever came to mind.  When a person appeared in the news, did the press ever bother to check to see if that person had a LiveJournal?  No.  Flash back even further, to 10 years ago, when everyone had an AOL account.  Did the press ever mention what a person’s AOL account name was, or what their AOL profile said?  Never.

But now it’s become commonplace for the press to search and shuffle through social networking sites and publish details about a person found on places like MySpace or Facebook, without even referencing in the news article what MySpace or Facebook is.

Case in point: the recent story of a married couple from Tracy, California accused of holding a 17 year old boy hostage in their home.  In the article published in the San Francisco Chronicle, towards the bottom of the article, was a quote from the home page of the wife of the accused couple:

On her MySpace page, Lau said her four children were ages 1 to 9. She described herself as a stay-at-home mother, a Daisy Girl Scouts leader and die-hard Oakland Raiders fan who is "happily married to a man who I love to death."

Schumacher, she wrote, "is my best friend and a wonderful father to our four kids and I wouldn’t trade him for anything in this world."

Is that type of information really relevant to the overall story?  Perhaps.  But is it true?  Neither the press or we could possibly know for sure.

Another more high-profile instance of the press looking at MySpace pages was when the story about Sarah Palin’s daughter, Bristol, getting engaged to the father of her baby, Levi Johnston.

Without questioning whether or not the page was legitimately owned by Johnston himself, the press repeatedly used quotes from what they believed was his MySpace page, including all the gory and embarrassing details that he had supposedly posted about himself.  In later interviews with Johnston, he claimed the page was generated by his friends at school, which whether you believe it or not, is at least a plausible story.

There are a lot of possible inferences to be made by these cases.  It could be argued that the press is relying too strongly on services that anyone could use to create bogus user profiles.  On the other hand, it shows a need for better tools for individuals to sign and own their user profiles with a kind of digital signature that proves its their own.  And finally, and really I think this is the most important one: don’t leave your profile public if you ever think you might end up being investigated by the press, especially if there are things on your profile that you would be embarrassed for the world to see. (You know, like that picture of you dressed up as a pirate holding that light beer in your hand with your arm around an anonymous stripper…)

Filed under: Consumer Web, Privacy, Social Computing