3pointD.com

Wendy Rockett of New American Media writes here about having her Friendster identity “stolen.” In fact, she was cloned, in a practice that’s been going on in virtual worlds like The Sims Online for years: rather than hijack Wendy’s profile by stealing her password, someone created a profile that looked very much like Wendy’s, then simply tried to pass themselves off as the original.

In trying to assume my life, this “Wendy” was making a complete mockery of it. “Wendy” had pictures of me on her site, my approximate age, astrology sign, and meticulous (and correct) details, such as the publisher I worked for in New York before moving to San Francisco. Otherwise, everything else about this “Wendy” was not me. I would never say something as cheesy as, “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” My favorite movies are those of indie Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai. Fake Wendy likes the Indiana Jones series.

The cloning itself isn’t so surprising. (After all, if you had a name like Wendy Rockett, you’d probably get cloned too.) What’s interesting in this case is that the cloner’s purposes were not particularly nefarious. He (for it seems to have been a he) just wanted a few more friends, it looks like. You could almost say the power of the medium drove him to it. In any case, the episode points up the fuzzy nature of identity in online contexts like Friendster, MySpace and 3D virtual worlds, and the need for tools that will allow us to verify and vouch for those identities in a secure manner.