The Hindu Business Line : Perils in cyberspace

The worst critics of the Internet will concede that there is hardly a minute of boredom in cyberspace. It is the continual online innovations that undoubtedly add spice to surfing. Newer and newer gimmicks engineered by enterprising groups and individuals account for the phenomenon of millions turning to the Net each week.

These tricks target the average modern youth who wants excitement all the time, and is not averse to experimenting with his life in pursuit of adventure. It is this trait that is the focus of attention in the rash of social networking Web sites that have sprung up in the recent past. MySpace and Facebook have almost become household names. There are several others that are catching up with them.

These sites promote ties between persons of identical interests with great ingenuity. Enduring online friendships are forged between individuals who may be divided by geography but have experiences to share. This is good as far as it goes. There is the flip side to online networking. Privacy and security concerns are becoming serious issues that we can ignore only at our peril.

There are numerous reports from different parts of the globe that speak of how unscrupulous elements are infiltrating these relatively new sites looking for potential victims. The euphoria generated by MySpace and Facebook and a host of other similar sites will, therefore, have to be tempered with caution and prudence, especially when a member opens up to a contact met online. This is, in fact, an extension of the already existing fears of child exploitation on the Net, a problem that law enforcement believes has boundless dimensions.

Open-door policy

Facebook has, in particular, received extraordinary media coverage in the past few months because of its open-door policy. It is said to have nearly 24 million active users. There is speculation that it has registered a triple-digit growth in recent months, thanks to its aggressive propaganda. (MySpace has 67 million members, making it the largest of the online groups.) A bulk of the membership comes from students. The popularity of Facebook in campuses is clear from the fact that in one university, namely University of Washington, Seattle, alone, out of a total enrolment of 42,000 students, 27,000 are Facebook members. What has drawn even greater attention is its invitation to a large number of technology companies to contribute their features to the Facebook service.

The terms offered are too attractive for many companies to spurn the Facebook overtures. The new features will enable members to listen to music, play games and enlist in charity drives, without leaving the site. This is a vast improvement over the existing limited facility of establishing online connection, sharing of photographs and planning events. There is, simultaneously, a fear that Facebook is opening itself to some chaos and making itself vulnerable to a greater volume of spam.

MySpace, which has an edge over Facebook in terms of membership volume, has a similar problem. According to a report carried by Washington Post, MySpace users were recently subjected to an attack that had the effect of converting t he victims’ sites and computers into hosts for phishing scams and viruses. The report added that some MySpace user pages were seeded with a computer code capable of exploiting holes in MS Windows and Internet Explorer. MySpace users visiting these pages were redirected to a fake MySpace log-in page where their personal information was stolen.

One Chief Forensic Officer of a technology company has reported that one of his infected machines was collecting about ten to twenty credentials of others every hour! Is this not a disaster that one has to be wary of?

Compounding danger

What should cause concern to many of us is that networking sites again place children in danger of becoming crime victims. Till the other day, it was only chat rooms that posed a real danger. This is the medium through which predators lured children out of their homes for executing a dishonest design. Sites such as MySpace and Facebook compound such dangers in respect of the youth.

Enhancing the age limit for membership is one means of reducing the hazard. But then such a limit is likely to be violated by those in the lower age group who are desperate to get into online contact with total strangers and go to the extent of fudging their age.

Networking sites with a huge membership do hardly have the time to check the veracity of claims made online with regard to age. This is why education on network dangers is an absolute necessity. We are aware of the travails of some sites trying to keep sex offenders out of their membership.

After some late realisation of the perils of admitting members without any restriction whatsoever, sites such as Facebook have hit upon a few measures, technological or others. We will have to wait and see whether they make any measurable impact on online crime.

Hilarious Instances

Finally, an unintended consequence of networking sites is their conversion into an investigation tool of organisations unable to otherwise monitor the undesirable activities of their constituents. Some instances that have come to notice are hilarious. Twenty students of the University of Cardiff in the UK are facing the music after hurling insults onsite against one member of the teaching faculty. Their questionable activity was detected through Facebook postings. Again, another 20 high school students in the US were disciplined after they threatened to murder another student and also made anti-Semitic utterances. Some Oxford University undergraduate students were hauled up after they were found to indulge in the questionable practice of “trashing’ at the end of their exams.

In the ultimate analysis, there are endless ways of using social networking sites to spy on as well as discipline an individual or a group. How far will this mechanics be considered lawful by Courts is the moot question. Privacy issues are of great relevance here.

It will be interesting to speculate how courts in India will react to the growth of Facebook or MySpace.

My own conjecture is that they will attach greater importance to the safety of the individual. If the two sites prove themselves strong on this feature, they may have nothing to worry about their future in our country. Privacy issues may rank next only in judicial estimate.

The writer is a former CBI Director who is currently Adviser (Security) to TCS Ltd.

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