Identity

According to Wikipedia, online identity is an online social identity that internet users establish on websites and online communities such as the use of avatars and pseudonyms (Wikipedia: Online Identity). Twelve years ago, I first started using the internet . It wasn’t available in my elementary school at the time, but it was available in my local library. So I, along with every other school aged kid used to sign up and wait upwards to an hour just to use 15 minutes of the Internet. It was amazing being able to amass so much information about anything and everything. But what I didn’t realize was the amount of people using the internet at the same time. What seemed to be an exciting new development turned out to be a world-wide phenomenon.

My parents finally bought their first home computer in 2001. Completely packaged with Microsoft Windows 98, and the America Online internet package, this was the first time I had the internet in my own home. AOL, was famous for its numerous chat rooms. You could chat about anything from Finance to Real Estate or even chat with people that live in the same city as you. Keep in mind that I had no parental supervision at all as my parents had trusted me to become a responsible internet user. and that, I was pretty much free to do whatever I wanted on the internet, as long as I didn’t purchase any items online.

My most memorable and first screen name that I used was “FKingOfTheWorld 237”. I had gained the reputation as a disruptive, rambunctious, trash talking troll that people would hate to chat with. I used to chat mostly in the New York chat room and what started off with as casual conversation turned out to be trash talking, slugfest. What started off as a one on one chat turned out to be fight which ultimately disrupted the board and caused its members to leave . Typical immaturity by a 13 year old, doing nothing but disrupting chat rooms.

The whole ruse continued until someone who chatted online in the same chat room threatened to stalk me and threatened my life. I tried to fight him back, verbally, but he was too strong and his words were scary enough to help me log off online as fast as possible. I was foolish enough to think that this man would actually come to my place and hurt me. He even threatened to hack into my account, that way I wouldn’t be able to log on to AOL anymore.

Several online stores have beefed up security to ensure protection for their online customers. Programs such as anti-phishing software and Passcode help give the illusion of protection, but some criminals have found ways around the new security measures by these online retailers. A lot of customer information is public and it easy to go online and steal the identity of the person you want to use as a target. So there are ways to get around these security blankets.