The wrong profile

>> A Mirror writer discovers someone has been impersonating him on Facebook

by SAMER ELATRASH

The notion behind Facebook seemed altogether too immodest when a friend explained the Web site to me a few months ago. Along with Friendster and MySpace, it’s the type of site where one creates a kind of personal shrine to himself, receiving homage from friends, and in turn paying homage to their shrines. Most users have at least a dozen photos of themselves online, and many add their phone numbers.

It cuts the stalker’s workload by half. Although one has to be approved as a friend by another user to access a profile, a good number of users seem keen on adding all the friends they can get to their networks.

So I had my misgivings, but after receiving several e-mail invitations, I decided to join Facebook a month ago. I thought it would at least keep me informed of events about town. I was soon preoccupied with trying to remove several pictures, which featured me shit-faced at a party, that a friend had tagged onto my profile.

I had just about become bored with the site when, two weekends ago, I discovered I had a Facebook impostor. I was shocked. And intrigued. And hooked. An old friend had invited me on his network, and as I looked over his list of Facebook contacts, there was another Samer Elatrash. This one had uploaded a picture of me he found on the Web to his profile.

I called up my friend, whom I hadn’t seen for more than a year. “Why is there another Samer on your friend list?” I briskly asked.

“I thought you had two profiles,” he responded.

“I have one,” I said. “Couldn’t you tell which one was real?” He couldn’t.

Fascinating, but with bizarre taste

I decided I had to access the imposter’s profile. I registered another profile under a false name (it wasn’t modelled after anyone real, as far as I knew) and sent the impostor a friend request, which he promptly accepted.

I couldn’t tear myself away from the imposter’s profile. He was a busy guy. He had registered the profile the day I discovered it, and proceeded to invite dozens of people. He also joined a housing group and announced he was looking for an apartment. He edited the profile information, adding a clutch of ditzy Arab pop stars for my musical preferences, and listed the Koran as my favourite book. The Koran’s a fine book, but sleazy pop star George Wassouf? I called my friend again: “George Wassouf? And you had no idea?” He said he thought I might have been joking.

The impostor kept adding friends. Who the hell were these people? Most seemed to be with the Israel-right-or-wrong crowd, and a few were my friends, who found the profile when they searched my name. They thought the profile was real, they told me, at any rate more real than my real boring profile.

I eventually sent the impostor a message from the fake profile I created. Would he like to come over—the impostor had written that he didn’t imbibe alcohol—for a coffee at my place?

“Hey man i would love to make it but i am in new york right now. i will be back next week. i am just having some fun with him,” he wrote back.

With whom, I asked? “I am with my cousin wassam. do you know him? I will give you a shout when i get back.” I don’t have a cousin Wassam.

I asked a friend to sign him up as a friend. She wrote to him that she had an apartment he could look at, to get an idea of how he would answer a response to his apartment ad. He told her he was in Egypt visiting relatives. “I’d like a date,” he added.

Over the line

The impostor joined two groups, one for and one against Stephen Harper. The anti-Harper group had misspelled the Prime Minister’s name in the group heading. “Learn to spell his name right,” wrote the impostor. “Who cares?” someone responded. “It was probably a Frenchman,” the imposter wrote.

This, I felt, had gone too far, and the weekend had ended, so I called both Facebook and a lawyer on Monday. The woman who answered at Facebook seemed sympathetic. “It’s happened before, so you’re not alone,” she said. She put me in contact with a customer service representative. He wrote back the next day and asked for my ID before he closed the profile. I demanded he allow me access to all the postings fake Elatrash had made, so I could judge the extent of the damage done. He said he couldn’t provide that information.

I scanned my Medicare card and sent it to Facebook, keeping an eye on the imposter’s profile. He began posting updates that “Samer is in hiding because Yoni Petel has sent the Israeli Mossad to terminate him.” Yoni Petel was a member of McGill Hillel when I was active in the campus pro-Palestinian movement, and he was obsessed with the notion that I was an anti-Semite (not that I cared, overuse of the charge against pro-Palestinians had made it as banal as a porno money shot).

The impostor then joined an online group that sought the enforcement of Islamic law and the restoration of the Caliphate, and which attracted enough gloomy Muslims to possibly encourage CSIS to monitor the postings.

Facebook responded Wednesday in an e-mail and said they had closed the account, and they were sorry for the trouble. But that didn’t seem enough. I imagined encountering a stranger, at a social event perhaps, who would slap me and say, “That’s for Facebook.” The impostor had shopped for an apartment in my name (strangely enough, I had just found an apartment the month before) and posted some rather inflammatory comments, so I was entitled to view all his postings and messages, wasn’t I? Not unless Facebook received a court order, said Jerry the customer representative.

“We will not share any user information unless that user permits it or we are required by law,” explained Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker, although the user in question had set up a fake profile.

Barker said Facebook would investigate the postings, but only after I persisted on the topic. My lawyer contacted Facebook toward the end of the week, asking them to help identify the impersonator and allow me access to his postings. He was told Facebook would only release the information if it received a court order.

Privacy trumps revenge

As annoying as that was, Damien Fox, the coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Canada, a group dedicated to protecting online privacy, says Facebook had good reason not to share the messages the impersonator had sent or posted.

“First, they want to save their own skin,” says Fox. “They want to get people using Facebook and attract advertising,” which could be undermined if Facebook seemed keen on handing out user information.

“You have a system that makes sense against the disclosure of private information,” he says. Had Facebook complied with my request to release the information, even though it was information from a fake profile, it would raise the issue of “how privacy is stripped away,” says Fox. Such a disclosure should only be made after a rigorous process that includes a court order, he says.

“It’s about who should have the right to know what, when and where. It’s not a perfect system, and some cases like yours slip through the cracks, but it’s going in the right direction,” he says. “There is a process in place that protects individuals from malicious acts by other individuals.”

Still, what would happen if an impersonator used a profile to issue death threats or harass another user? Fox says it would be up to the recipient to report the harassment to Facebook and the police. In my case, Facebook’s promise to investigate whether the fake Elatrash had done anything illegal was, if true, a problem in itself, says Fox.

“How would they know something is a crime?” he says. “Think of all the ways a joke can be written. Would you really want Facebook to go over everything and report what they think is a crime?”

Follow this link to view Facebook profile.