Stanford Business magazine

Online Identity

Facing Mean Streets of Information Highway

By Connie Skipitares

LAST MAY, a Connecticut woman with a Stanford MBA was surprised by a stranger’s phone call asking about her personal background. That’s when she learned that a woman in Washington state with a similar name had apparently lifted details of her biography off the internet, including her graduate degree from Stanford, and was using it in her profile on an online social networking site.

The Washington woman, it appeared, had used the Google search engine to look for her own unusual name, and the Stanford MBA’s biographical information popped up. With a few clicks, the data was hers. She used it to enhance her business profile on networking site LinkedIn.

In January, another Stanford alum, Liz Lynch, discovered that an Australian man had taken an article she wrote off the internet, slapped his own byline on it, and posted it on his website. Lynch, MBA ’92, learned this when she tried to submit the piece to an online article directory, and the fake author’s name surfaced. To add insult to injury, Lynch was accused by the directory of being the plagiarist.

Incidents like these show how life in cyberspace can bite. Even if you choose not to hop on the web and post information about yourself—the Stanford MBA from Connecticut had never joined a networking site—some information is out there somewhere and usually outside your control. As Sun Microsystems cofounder Scott McNealy, MBA ’80, has said: “You have zero privacy. Get over it.”

Some professional and corporate sites, for instance, post lists of organization members and rosters of company officers. Stanford faculty and deans are profiled at some length on School and professional websites. Many management positions such as officers of public corporations, nonprofits, or government agencies require the position holders to be listed publicly. In today’s world, that does not mean just being listed in a corporate report, but also having a biography on the organization’s website.

Life was very different before the internet. If you wanted to find out if someone had been sued, convicted of a crime, or licensed to practice medicine you would go to a local, state, or federal building and spend hours manually digging through paper or microfiche files. Today, government websites, or commercial websites that mine public records, make information on individuals easily available. While some feel personal information should be more private than it is, others note that individuals also benefit from the easy retrieval of information. Many web users, for instance, find jobs, old friends, professional contacts, or the loves of their lives through the internet.

In a survey of Stanford MBAs by the Business School Alumni Association, more than half of respondents who graduated since 2000 said they use GSB-specific social networking sites. Nearly 60 percent use sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and 35 percent of the recent graduates surveyed have their own website.

Lynch, who is executive director of the Center for Networking Excellence, which helps business professionals build relationships, uses the web to find potential customers, business partners, suppliers, and prospective employees for herself and others. “With more than 25 million members on LinkedIn, for example, you can find just about anyone you want to reach. What makes these sites so powerful is how they can facilitate passive networking, when people and opportunities find their way to you,” she says.

For example, Lynch markets herself and her new book, Smart Networking: Attract a Following in Person and Online, by posting to her Facebook profile the videos she has made that offer tips on how to network. Her web “friends” send the videos to others and make comments back to her, which lets her build relationships “all over the world,” she says. “I use Facebook primarily as a marketing tool, not as a social tool.’’

Lynch eventually resolved her issue with the plagiarist, whom she calls “Sam,” by asking him to remove her article from his site. He did. But she vividly recalls her first reaction to seeing the article on his site: “I was literally shaking. It’s like seeing a stranger walking around your house and wearing your clothes pretending to be you.”

The Connecticut-based MBA whose graduate degree was lifted on LinkedIn ended up calling police in her small town to report the incident. A detective contacted the imposter and requested she remove the information from her online biographies. The woman denied knowing anything about how the information got on her LinkedIn profile, but it was removed. “I still felt violated,’’ said the Stanford alumna, whom we are not identifying because we cannot prove that the person with the similar name intended to commit fraud. “I froze my credit accounts right away,’’ the real MBA said. “I found out this woman had been prosecuted for insurance fraud, so I was nervous.”

NONE OF THE STANFORD GRAD’S financial accounts were touched, but those in the business of protecting personal privacy say people who lift someone else’s law degree, college transcripts, or other professional credentials often find their way into that person’s financial data and exploit that, too.

“It all comes down to wanting some kind of personal gain or benefit, whether it’s stealing a title or fancy degree or money,” says Jay Foley, cofounder of the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego, a nonprofit that assists cybercrime victims. “You steal a degree because you want prestige that you hope leads to a good-paying job with lots of money. Money is usually the bottom line.”

Owen Tripp, MBA ’08, cofounder of ReputationDefender, a company that sells security services and helps victims clear up online profile problems, believes resume and credential theft is a growing problem in today’s dismal economy. “Everyone’s trying to get a leg up, to create a great resume that’s going to get them that good job, or to build a better credit profile to help them buy that house,’’ he says.

A host of recent surveys of job applicants conducted by companies and reported to sources such as New York Times Market Research and Nolo Press estimate that between 33 and 75 percent of job seekers exaggerate or lie on their resumes about such facts as job responsibilities and employment dates. But again, the web cuts both ways because employers and others also discover falsehoods by doing web searches.

Removing errors or embarrassing facts about yourself can be difficult, however. Many complaints that Tripp handles, for instance, are from people who feel ridiculed by postings such as doctored photos of themselves in a compromising situation or fake profiles on a website such as Facebook or MySpace. Some are revenge postings, often made by ex-spouses.

Websites “are not going to take down something by simple request,” according to attorney Mari Frank, who handles such cases and was once a victim of someone stealing her identity and impersonating her for several months. “They need hard proof that something is inaccurate. You’re up against a wall.”

Some social networking sites offer web links to lodge complaints. A spokeswoman for Facebook, which does not allow its representatives to be identified by name according to the spokesperson we reached by telephone and email, said the networking site investigates complaints about postings and determines if they should be removed. She would not give specifics about what type of content is removed or statistics on the number or types of complaints. She said only that Facebook “takes quite a bit down.”

A handful of new laws surrounding privacy and identity abuse on the internet have been enacted in the past three years, but they largely reiterate existing fraud laws that focus on victims of financial abuse. Protections should be broadened to incorporate a range of abuses, says Lauren Gelman, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

“Financial gain is easy to quantify,’’ she says. “But how do you quantify the harm of somebody using someone else’s graduate degree, for instance? There is general fraud there, but there isn’t a mechanism to deal with it.”

A number of privacy protection firms offer assistance locating offenders and cleaning up a person’s profile. Many, but not all, charge fees. The firms claim to have sophisticated technology to do “deep” searches that the average computer user cannot do. When a suspected offender is located, Tripp says his company simply contacts the person and asks that he or she desist. Surprisingly, the approach usually works. But in many cases, the damage has been done and can be long lasting. Offensive or fake postings can be removed from sites, but often they can lurk somewhere in cyberspace forever. A doctor whose identity was used by an imposter to commit Medicare fraud is still trying years later to convince people he is not the man who perpetrated the fraud.

That doesn’t deter web fans like Lynch. “I’m not going to stop marketing myself online, just as I’m not going to stop shopping online,” she says. “It’s just too convenient and too effective, and the vast numbers of people I’m able to market my services to far outweigh the handful who might steal some of my profile information.” 

Connie Skipitares is a Bay Area–based journalist.

Illustration by Stuart Bradford.

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