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I laughed out loud when I read Jennifer Sarnow’s article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on "The Cut-and-Paste Personality." Seems a growing trend now is identity theft of online profiles. No, not your credit card info or social security number. But your humor, interests and words.
"Lacking inspiration and a moral compass…Copycats use the real-life wit of others to create cut-and-paste personas, hoping to land dates or just look clever," she writes.
It's not a laughing matter of course, but the article gave so many egregious examples, including one thief who said "he wanted women to know he was funny but was too lazy to think up anything," and a victim who went on a couple of bad dates with someone and upon re-reading his online profile found that "he had copied her entire 'About Me' paragraph including, 'I'm afraid of heights and large birds.'"
Unbelievable, isn't it? Do you see why I had to laugh even though this is a very serious matter?
I don't have a Match.com profile (I'm happily married 12 years) and have never had anything stolen from my Facebook profile (should I be offended?) but my ezine articles have been stolen, which I find so interesting since I give people permission to use them as long as my byline and bio are included (the instructions following each article are pretty clear). So no one who is looking for good content needs to resort to stealing from me. However I don't give permission to claim the article as one's own, which one person did. He took the article down after I notified him, but I was still shaken to see what was essentially my body on someone else's head.
Sarnow says "the Internet makes plagiarism anonymous and easy." While I do agree that the web makes words easier steal, it also makes it easier to get caught. Once people find examples of plagiarism on your online profiles or web pages, you've totally lost their trust and all hope of building any kind of relationship – romantic, professional or otherwise.
As I wrote in a post last summer about the fake credentials scandal in Korea, without trust, what do you have?
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