JaseZone's social networking chain-letter
I tried calling the Jase Group to ask them about this, but the recorded message told me to contact them via the website. Link
It's a bold and brazen ponzi scheme. I did not register with JaseZone, nor invite anyone. The material was scraped from other sources. They have my age wrong. The picture is from the web, and out of date (I've had a beard for 8 years). It is a lie that I "last login on January 14, 2008" since I have never logged in. My "friends" listed on the page are vacuous, just place-holders to populate the place. What a scam.
I may have this whole thing wrong. If so, someone please correct me. I'd love to know what is really going on. The phone number of the company simply shunts you to their website.
But it raises an interesting question: who owns your friendships? Is the fact that you are friends with X -- particularly if you declare so on one networking site -- now public knowledge that can be used by anyone? Is the shape of your life as revealed publicly part of the commonwealth, and in the public domain?
I suspect that your relationships are in the public domain once you make them public on the web, and so reverse engineering your social network from this information is not illegal, although it may not be socially acceptable or a good business practice. It feels more like a chain-letter to me.
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That's actually kindof creepy. They are probably doing it to make it look like they have more members than they actually do, but still, it is creepy.
w3top.org does a similar thing but uses information available on Twitter. The really weird part is that during their quest for a profile image for "my" account (probably a Google image search), they got my cousin's twitter profile picture instead.
Was it actually the site that did it? Or some random weirdo?
Almost the same thing occured to me. I made a Redbox account a couple of years ago (I think Redbox disappeared or renamed to netlog). Well, yesterday a friend asked me if I still used my netlog-account. And I said I didn't, I didn't even remember that I had one.
I went to the site and looked, they claimed that I changed my profile-picture 31 december 2007, which is impossible, because I wasn't even home that day. Also my picture was actually changed into a picture used on another community.
I'll just close that account, but I did find it creepy.
Sounds like a pretty good reason not to reveal your personal information (including friendships) by participating in stupid social networking sites to begin with.
I mean really, what's the point? What possible purpose does it serve, except to show off how many friends you've got to the world?
FTA: "Is the shape of your life as revealed publicly part of the commonwealth, and in the public domain?"
Yes. And so it should be. The idea that what's public is public is the same one that gives us photographers' rights, for example.
That's not to say this isn't creepy. But I don't think you can have it both ways; you can't enjoy the right to be a public observer, then get offended when other people use that right in a way you don't like.
Best way to deal with it is probably ridicule. Or find public details about the company directors, and create them a profile on your favourite social networking site.
#6 makes a good point. However, isn't there an element of fraud here? This profile was designed to appear as his own, and as he created it. Surely there is a difference between observing someone's public information and impersonating someone, right?
This same thing happened to a lot of us. I posted about it on my own blog yesterday:
http://www.rushkoff.com/2008/01/jasezone.php
I figured it could have been a one-off as well, but someone managed to do a bunch of us...