What’s in a cyber identity? Ask Salman Rushdie

The recent news items about the spat that Rushdie is having with Facebook over the freezing of his account definitely points to one thing. An authentic Cyber citizenship is important.

More and more people are looking at cyber space as a community, like the real community we live in with its social norms and rules. Cyber roamers are now getting used to being responsible for using the cyber community.

Like a democratic real world, where there are consequences and punishments for breaking laws if one is reported and caught, cyber space is also quite democratic. For example, if bad content is reported on Facebook, the account can be seized. Losing an account is quite a deterrent since once the authentic account is seized, one may never get their name back, and living an entire life without a Facebook account is quite a dreadful thought.

The hue and cry over Salman Rushdie losing his Facebook account was that the username was seized considering him to be an imposter. It was with much battle and months of communicating to the Facebook team, including emails to Mark Zuckerberg, that he was able to reactivate another account.

Responsible cyber citizenship is a whole lot more that avoiding the use of bad language, not stalking people or uploading bad and offensive content. It calls for a lot of proactive responsibility.
A decade ago cyber crimes and cyber terrorism existed only in the movies. Now it exists for real. Since the internet is used for everything from entertainment to enterprises, a lot goes online from theft of identity and web addresses, money laundering to stealing other people's data. Apart from the professional trouble makers, young inexperienced people can also get into unintended difficulties.

Sometimes young people can get into serious trouble for hacking. In India, the idea of 'cracking' a phone or an ipad or a mobile gaming device like PSP in order to use pirated software is so common that the magnitude of hacking into other people's sites on the internet may not be understood. Hacking is a serious crime and breaking into any government or security sites like NASA can lead to severe penalties such as years of imprisonment.

About a decade ago when internet and emails were first being used, using a dummy name for sns sites or private emails was quite common. Since people were not quite sure of the security, hiding one's identity or using a pen name was the common thing to do. With increased security and with cyber-roaming assuming significant time and lifestyle of people, using one's own identity is considered quite safe.

However, using one's name comes with a degree of responsibility or else the cyber citizen can be subjected to prolonged difficulty as Rushdie has found out.

Salman Rushdie is now back on Facebook but his new account reads, Ahmed Rushdie. This is the cost of losing a cyber citizenship; one may never get back their real identity on the world wide web.

The writer is  an entrepreneur and educationist