Social Engineering, Ethics, and Why You Should Never Put Anything Online That You Don’t Want Others To See

Okay, now here’s an example of how people will take information you’ve given them, under false pretenses, just because they can, and post it for the world to see, with no regrets about how it hurts other people.


This 32 year-old-man, Jason Fortuny, pretended to be a “hot woman looking for sex with no strings attached” on Craigslist, and people, looking for love in all the wrong places, from a “hot, kinky professional woman,” not only replied, they also sent this fraudster their photos and other explicit details.
Should they have sent such information? Of course not! But let’s focus now on the actions of the callous cad who did this experiment just for fun.
The man who posted the deceptive ad reportedly did so just to see what kind of responses he would get. He then posted all the 150+ responses…including email addresses, messages and photos…on his blog.
He did it for “curiosity.”
He’s now being sued for $75,000+ for copyright infringement and invasion of privacy.
He calls the lawsuit frivolous and does not regret doing anything that he’s done.
“The consequences on other people is a great conversation,” he told the reporter after saying he had no regrets.
He says he does not regret and does not empathize with any of the people whose messages and photos he posted.
Whoa!
Talk about the Internet desensitizing people, and making them completely uncaring about how their actions impact those of others they just view in the digital universe.
He presented himself as something he was not, tricked people into giving him sensitive and explicit information, then he posted that information just to have something to have a conversation about. Completely unfeeling.
Does this guy even have an ethical or moral compass? Listen to him in the news story and judge for yourself.
Also a classic social engineering trick.
You can use this as an example of:
1) How social engineers can easily trick people into giving out sensitive personal information,
2) How there are many people who, desensitized by the feeling of anonymity they get from using the Internet, will do bad things to gullible others without caring about the consequences to them, and
3) How no one should ever post any information to the Internet that they would not want the whole world to see.
Andrew Aguecheek provides a very interesting discussion of this deplorable experiment on his site if you’d like to see more details.

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