The Guardian: Online commenting: How the internet created an age of rage
posted by zarq on Jul 25, 2011 - 93 comments

£17,000 damages for victim of fake Facebook profile. Matthew Firsht found a fake facebook profile created in his name, and he has successfully sued the person who did it. Amol Rajan knows exactly what having your facebook online ID 'stolen' feels like, as do many others. Are your social networking friends always who they say they are?
posted by dabitch on Jul 29, 2008 - 31 comments

claimID is an online identity management tool, recently out of beta. Essentially it's a way of helping people and search engines understand who you are, but also who you are not. It's closely tied to the OpenID project, discussed briefly in this thread.
posted by runkelfinker on Jun 25, 2006 - 35 comments

Once, i had a secret lovelife.... The urge to act out an entirely different persona is widely shared across cultures as well, social scientists say, and may be motivated by curiosity, mischief or earnest soul-searching. Certainly, it is a familiar tug in the breast of almost anyone who has stepped out of his or her daily life for a time, whether for vacation, for business or to live in another country. On secret lives, for good and bad. We're in this too: "I think what people are doing on the Internet now," she said, "has deep psychological meaning in terms of how they're using identities to express problems and potentially solve them in what is a relatively consequence-free zone." Yet out in the world, a consequence-rich zone, studies find that most people find it mentally exhausting to hold onto inflammatory secrets - much less lives - for long. (NYT, reg.req.)
posted by amberglow on Jan 11, 2005 - 36 comments