This is a follow on from our posts to a topic “Hey, what happened to the…” where the rather dubious practices of some of the “web trawling” sites were discussed.
This started me thinking - do you think that the behaviour of some people on the net is really much worse than in the non-net business world? The physhing emails, spam and various sites set up to defraud people seem to be out of all proportion to what I see normally in business (keeping in mind that I spent many years in the forensic accounting field and have probably been more aware of illegal business behaviour than most people!)
Maybe it’s just that I am used to the more regulated business environment in Australia, and now see what the unregulated version is like! What do others think?
The internet offers both greater anonymity and cheaper access to large numbers of people than the offline world, therefore it is not terribly surprising that annoying-to-unsavory practices would flourish. Of course, the “cheaper access to large numbers of people” also means that they’re sometimes easier to uncover than in the real world - I remember a brief newspaper article a few years ago about some policemen who had caught a couple of guys for selling meth crystals over the internet. But I must say the creepiest abuse of the internet I have ever heard of I read about in an article I read in the New York Times about the online child pornography trade (which blends with the online child molestation trade too). The creepiest thing about it is that they actually convince children themselves to create photos of themselves and run their own websites by offering the children lots of cash. Indeed, one comment in the article of one of the consumers of the child pornography was “It’s not our fault that children make these websites themselves” (except it is, as the article explains).
Yes, I hadn’t even started on all the other very sleazy practices on the net! We already have governments (such as our own) trying to talk up the idea of web censorship, something I view with dismay, but with so many creepy people preying on the young, not to mention the dubious “cures” for illnesses and “get rich quick” scams it will soon become difficult to put up an convincing anti-censorship argument. Of course, once governments start censoring anything it is strange how quickly they move to censoring any anti-government views! What would be wonderful would be for all governments to bring in universal anti-fraud, anti-child predator laws and prosecute the sharks no matter where they base their activities. I place that on the “highly improbable” list along with World Peace, ending famine and reversing global warming. 