How One Woman's Digital Life Was Weaponized Against Her | Hacker News Reader

How One Woman's Digital Life Was Weaponized Against Her

wired.com

52 pointsrafaelc19 comments

I set this aside for several days and finally just got around to reading it. It was a really excellent, if frightening, article.

I'm also not sure what conclusions to draw.

- There is this weird idea, that one does not need to meet another person in real life in order to build a real, meaningful relationship.

- Internet is a great place, but it also provides venue for people, that want to get outraged and want to get involved in conflicts, that under normal circumstantions they would never even hear of.

Is there any study on the consequences of such harassment?

I believe the conclusion to draw from the article is that people can be terrible, and with the advent of the internet people can be terrible in new ways that draw from your past, more easily.

I think it's frightening sometimes how much information we give up over the internet, and on social media platforms. I don't think most people realize it.

Do we really need articles like these on HN ?

You're wondering if an article talking about how the lack of privacy and the collection of unprecedented amounts of personal information and how it relates to cybercrime should be on HN?

I'm not really sure what conclusions to draw from this article. Don't cheat on your husband? And on the other side, don't stalk and harass your ex!

More importantly, if you're going to cheat, don't send anything that you don't want to see posted on social media.

Cheating has nothing to do with it.

That’s true, but the images weren’t the worst part. Years of harassment and fiction sent to people they came in contact with, and spoofed/forged communications were what caused the most harm.

It’s a nobrainer about images but I for one could not stay sane if i had to explain to every new employer that there is overhead in hiring me in the form of violent emails from a stalker.

This isn’t a shruggie and be done with it story.

Revenge porn has nothing to do with cheating.

> don't send anything [to anyone] that you don't want to see posted on social media.

I'd call this a fundamental rule of online interaction.

> I'm not really sure what conclusions to draw from this article. Don't cheat on your husband? And on the other side, don't stalk and harass your ex!

No, those are not the conclusions to draw from this article.

You might start with:

- do not send information you do not wish to be made public to others

- online harassment can have devastating consequences

- authorities are prone to respond to bogus information multiple times even though it should be clear to them who the victims are

- there is no effective way to stop such harassment in a timely manner

On the plus side, it could have been worse, fortunately no SWATting or such happened, but it easily could have.

Those are YOUR conclusions, he has a right to his own. Don't impose your ideologies onto others. Not that I support his, but I'm not a fan of you taking an authoritarian stance here - "Here's what you should be thinking..".

Really? This is addressed in the article itself:

> BUT THAT LEFT another question. What if the case did go to trial? Even if she could convince a jury—which would mean explaining the complexities of how identity is both hidden and revealed on the internet—could she get them to care? Cyberharassment is still an unappreciated crime. Gary Ernsdorff, a prosecutor in King County, where the Allens live, said that people often don’t think it’s that big a deal—it’s just online, after all. Or they blame victims for sharing intimate images in the first place. What, Van Engelen wondered, would a jury make of the Allens’ saga? Would they think Steven had gone too far in exposing the affair? Would they blame Courtney for the videos? Though Van Engelen saw the Allens as victims, she realized a jury might not.

> Many people assume that cyberharassment is easy to avoid: They believe that if victims hadn’t sent a naked photo, then that person would have nothing to worry about. But experts say this assumption is essentially a comforting fiction in a world in which we’re all potential victims. A 2016 survey found that one in every 25 Americans online—roughly 10 million people—had either had explicit images of themselves shared online against their will or had been threatened with such sharing. For women younger than 30, it was one in 10. The same survey found that, photos or no, 47 percent of Americans who used the internet had been victims of online harassment of some kind.

How about: Every piece of information you collect online can and probably will, at some point, be used by someone, against someone, unless you, Mr. Software Engineer, do something to prevent it. Something effective, not symbolic.

For one, that if someone really wants to digitally harass you it's practically impossible to prevent them from doing so.

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