Footy star sues Facebook over fake fascist profile

Interesting problem...

I personally don't have any sort of FaceSpace profile, nor am I likely to. However, as shown hrere, there is nothing to stop an aggrieved 3rd party creating a malicious one in my name. Am I meant to check these things every so often, or should it be that some sort of verification system should be set up? You set up an account with a valid postal address, then a verification password is sent to that address. Only after activation can the MyBookArseSpace profile be viewed/searched etc.

re dangermouse

but what happens when baron greenback, claims that he called dangermouse living at his address they will then send the password verification to his address and as they wont show your address on the site there is no way to tell you apart if he is using pictures of you. Hence not a lot you can do.

Re; Dangermouse

It couldbe mailed to several different addresses. It also doesn't stop me setting up any other kind of account (email for one) in your name. So once you get off of the social networkign sites, do you continue it out to all other sites that require registration?

And not just profile pages...

Being an active FB member, I've spotted several fake "Pages" (a special kind of profile intended for businesses, organisations and celebrities - you become a fan rather than friend). Although FB states on the creation page that it's against their terms of service to create fake pages, I haven't heard anything about action being taken to remove them.

Dangermouse's proposition could potentially work - but you'd need to make sure the address given was where the real person lived, not where Joe Bloggs lives. Since you can give a real world phone number, cross-match name address and phone number...

If it's impractical to do that in real-time, allow the page to be created, but slap an *Unverified* label to the user's name / page.

But on a related subject, it would be nice if they'd give people a better privacy level by default - knowledgeable users like me are perfectly happy with tweaking permissions to ensure that different friends get access to different parts of your profile, but there an awful lot of users who leave everything accessible by "All my networks and all my friends"...

"Only my friends" would be a better privacy level for most info.

@Dangermouse

Well, *obviously* the solution is that we all have ID cards....

Or that MySpaceBo pages are all created anonymously/using nicknames and you have to tell you friends which is your page.