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At Metromojo, we've been operating online communities since 2003. Over the past few years, I've seen trends wax and wane. One particularly disconcerting activity is definitely on the upswing. I'll call it lifejacking.
I'm not referring to the more common identity theft (there's insurance for that). Let's create a working definition. Lifejacking is the act of impersonating another person online, often in an effort to actively alter status, reputation, and credibility of the individual whose identity is being misrepresented.
I see two basic scenarios. Most often, the one doing the jacking presents herself as the other person by creating a fake profile. The fake profile is usually filled with pictures of the person whose identity is being utilized. To complicate matters, the lifejacker frequently has the foresight to create a (new) email address containing elements of the victim's persona, which is simply an added complication for site administrators. The goal of this 'jack is almost always to trash the victim's reputation. Yahoo just dealt with this type of thorny lifejacker case. In these cases, the offending party almost always knows the victim, usually with some level of intimacy.
In a more generic lifejacking scenario, the bad guy impersonates a victim who already has some degree of notoriety. The effort might be of libelous intent, simple humor with no particularly malicious activity or even just to claim 15 minutes of fame by piggybacking on the victim's "net cred." There has been a decent amount of coverage for this type, most particularly the celebrity lifejacking that has caused Twitter to verify accounts. This can be even more difficult to detect on Facebook, due to the granular control offered by the site's privacy settings.
As an operator of a social network with similar challenges (though of a much lower volume than the big boys), I am both relieved by the common carrier protection (USC Title 47, Common Carrier Reg., Sec. 230 - No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider) and concerned about the safety of our members. To that end, I propose a standard method of reporting these seemingly more innocuous types of identity theft, so that when online publishers do receive reports of a lifejacking, we can act in a consistent and aggressive manner, assisted by a high quality of evidence.
Apparently, the FTC already fields complaints of ID theft. The logical extension would be to create a clearinghouse for submissions that include lifejacking. In this case, our team would direct anyone claiming victim status to file an official FTC complaint. Once processed, that complaint could be parsed and notification sent back to our admin team for action. In this way, the federal government would become the record keeper for a class of activities that should be treated seriously, and publishers would have an authoritative source for actions that require removal and/or banning of a particular member.
In an age when acquaintances come to know each other online, and may never actually meet in person (or meet a second time), it makes sense to have an expeditious and high-level process for minimizing the damage caused by lifejackers. Just as more traditional identity theft is taken seriously, we need a solution with a clearly defined methodology for assisting victims of identity theft 2.0.
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Keith