Jay Dezelic wrote:
I keep hearing about this.  Is it really that common for people to swipe images and profile info to set up their own?  What percentage of profiles are suspected to be fake on Myspace? or MM?

How do the site moderators know who is the real person if there is a dispute?  The reason why I ask is that I think there should be some kind of authentication service offered on the web to certify people.  Would anyone be willing to pay for such a thing? If you were authenticated by a credible source, then you would never have a problem trying to prove infringement.  I would suspect that it would be a real headache for moderators to solve disputes.  Since perpetrators lie about there profile in the first place, they will also try to defend the lie by naming the victim as the perpetrator.  Signup dates don't always help because the perpetrator could have taken the images from another site and signed up first.

How about it? Any investors out there want to talk about setting up a personality authentication service? PM me.

And, it just occurs to me:  To prove to myspace who you are, wouldn't you need to email them some convincing ID, like birth certificate, passport, drivers license?  But then that information is out there in cyberspace!

Alas, alack!

William Coleman wrote:
And, it just occurs to me:  To prove to myspace who you are, wouldn't you need to email them some convincing ID, like birth certificate, passport, drivers license?  But then that information is out there in cyberspace!

Alas, alack!

That's why a trusted confidential third party ID verification service is needed. - Like Verisign.

Kaitlyn M wrote:
Myspace handles disputes by asking the person who has had the identity "stolen" to send in a picture holding a sign reading Myspace and the number following their account log on information. Sucks if you don't have a digital camera readily available but I guess it is one way to handle the problem.

LOL  That's funny.  What if the pics you had in your port were highly stylized and a snap shot of you looks nothing like your pro pics.  Some of the people who steel identities try to find people with similar characteristics.  I guess it would catch the 50+ yr old beer-bellied pervs at least.

Marcus J. Ranum wrote:
Finally I had to tell him that his "fiancee" was pulling some weird stuff on him and he confronted "her" and - it turned out that his fiancee was a 400-lb guy who lived with his mom in a basement apartment and had been sending out the pictures because "If I were a girl, that's what I'd look like. So pretty."

mjr.

Eeeeeewwwwwwww! Yuuccchhhh!

How do the site moderators know who is the real person if there is a dispute?

Some of the "rate my [x]" type sites ask that the real person take a digital photo of him/herself holding a piece of paper with handwriting on it (something like, "hi, I'm the real so-and-so").  They call it a "salute".  Salutes can be faked sometimes, too, though, when the faker photoshops handwriting off and tries to put new text over the blank area.  That's why I recommend that people slightly crease the paper or hold it in a way that causes shadows to fall unevenly across the whole thing.  Much harder for thieves to work with that way.

What if the pics you had in your port were highly stylized and a snap shot of you looks nothing like your pro pics.

Then you have to go out of your way to reproduce a pose used in one of the stolen photos, so they can see that the eyes / jawline / whatever are unmistakably yours.  Most of the photos in my portfolio look like separate people, so I've had to do that sort of thing a few times.  PAIN IN THE *SS.

The guy I dealt with most recently tried to convince me that he was "paying homage" to my work - at the same time as he was trying to use my images to negotiate TFP sessions with models.

Ugh, I hate that.  Usually when I bust people with mine (or my model friends') photos, the thief tries to take some sort of high moral ground.  "You should be flattered I thought you were so pretty I wanted to be you!"  Um, NO.  It's not flattering, it's creepy.

I've had a few experiences in the past where random dudes have contacted me after their online girlfriend has disappeared.  Surprise-- it was someone using my photos.  I feel bad for the guys, and it pisses me off that some *sshole somewhere thinks it's TOTALLY OKAY to play with people like that.  It's crap.

I started doing two things that has almost made this BS stop.

1) I stopped uploading large, high-res images to the web.  300x400 pixels @ 72 dpi is the largest nowadays.  If someone wants a print quality version of one, s/he needs to get in touch with the photographer and probably BUY one.

2) I watermark all of my images with my URL and that of the photographer (if s/he has one).

In the last year or so, I have only found ONE person using one of my older photos.  It was stolen from the photographer's website.  The site she'd posted it on was taking so long to respond to my requests to have it removed that I had to take matters into my own hand-- I posted revealing comments on her page every day (she kept deleting them) until she deleted her entire account (way before the site got around to doing anything).  Talk about annoying.

Seriously... watermarks seem to be the only real way to deter people from stealing your photos.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/copywrong

Jay Dezelic wrote:
That's why a trusted confidential third party ID verification service is needed. - Like Verisign.

And who, pray tell, will trust the "trusted" companies like Verisign?

My solution is P2P trust networks, which take an entirely different view (that centralized "authorities," whether governmental or corporate, are less trustworthy than relationship-based voucher systems). I'm not interested in whether *you* say you are Jay or whether Verisign saw a faxed driver's license once--I'd rather see that a bunch of people *I* know online can vouch for you, or someone they vouched for can etc. Think MySpace "extended network" on steroids, and with something besides "hotness" determining who is on your "friends" list.

I have some esoteric ramblings on my blog (www.tallent.us) about this, but I'm a computer programmer by trade, and one requirement of being a real programmer is apparently to incessantly talk about your next email-killer idea and never actually have time to build it.