Discuss some issue of personal, local, national, or international concern and its importance to you - Essay Example

Your full September 22, Personal Essay- Fake Profiles in Social Media It is both a personal and an international concern that people misrepresent themselves to others on social networking sites and chat groups by displaying incorrect information about their age or gender. Though it is ethically incorrect, however it becomes harmful only when the person adopts false identity or creates fake profiles with the intention of harming others by getting access to their personal information. Attacks from false identity adopters who are also called sockpuppets, have increased considerably in social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, Orkut, and the like.

This is because it is as easy as ABC to create false profiles on social media. Criminals use this opportunity to get access to others’ profiles by sending friend requests. Once approved, they get access to the victim’s personal data, photographs and albums which they might forward to adult sites, or this may lead to telephonic conversations and meetings, and nobody knows about the consequences. The criminal can also adopt identity of real people by using their hacked photographs and information, for the purpose of attracting friends.

This topic holds a strong place among ethical issues in e-marketing. Internet savvy persons are getting more and more informed about false e-marketing or fake e-business advertisements. False identity helps the criminal in preplanned attacks against payment systems like pensions and medical insurance. E-marketing ethics require that in order to carry out effective e-marketing, the e-marketer must base the business on honest grounds. If he is honest in displaying his identity, consumers will automatically come to him because e-consumers always do business with the names they can trust.

Similarly, it is unethical to adopt the identity of another successful organization as doing so tends to bring harm to the reputation of the owner of the cloned identity. According to PR Log, a Press Release, twenty fake identity factories had been sealed which were being operated by criminals who produced cloned driving licenses and utility bills. The Metropolitan Police was able to track down these factories in an Operation, arrested the criminals and closed the factories. If such criminals keep on getting caught, then this would be a good lesson for those who think of crossing the ethical boundaries in interacting with social media and in carrying out e-marketing.

Anna Johnson revealed in her article that according to a research conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, about the accuracy of WHOIS information provided by its registrants, “23 percent of WHOIS records are fully accurate, 8 percent are patently false, and the remaining 69 percent are somewhere in between, containing some missing or inaccurate information”. She stated that there were numerous hindrances in maintaining the accuracy of identities, such as, information privacy, perplexity in the required information, no requirement for identity proof, and etcetera.

This issue is important to me because I am also a part of online social networks and I believe that everybody visiting social media or carrying out e-marketing should be aware of the code of ethics presented in various data protection laws and legislation so that nobody dares to adopt someone else’s identity in order to deceive the owner of the identity and other innocent people. This is a crime and should be considered seriously both at the individual as well as governmental level.Works CitedJohnson, Anna.

“WHOIS Data Unreliable – 77 Percent False or Incomplete.” Kikabink News. WHOIS, 2010. Web. 22 Sep 2011. .PR Log. Fake ID factories raided, [Press release]. Bedfordshire: PRLog.Org, 2009.