Hide your kids, hide your wife

Photo creds

The internet is a very scary place.

It was not created for good and we, as a society, have been unable to contain its powers of evil. As it grows, it becomes better and better at masking its evil ways under the disguise of social networking, therefore taping into human vanity to distract us from what is truly happening.

And if it wasn’t bad enough that the internet is evil, corporate America has jumped on the bandwagon of social networking because they want to be your friend too!

When I found out about the Australian company that stole an innocent young lady’s snapshot off of the internet and used it for their ad campaign, I was simultaneously ashamed to be a graphic designer and ashamed to have been among the generation that made Facebook cool, therefore making it a target for advertising. We have created a monster, and unlike the BFG (that’s the Big Friendly Giant) the internet and the companies that target consumers through their human instinct to want to use the internet, have absolutely no moral compass!

This is not to say that the young lady who posted the picture on the internet in the first place is completely innocent. Nope. She probably did not read the fine print before pressing ok. If she had read the fine print she would have realized that by placing this picture on the internet, she has signed away her identity to any and everyone who wants it. I don’t mean identity in terms of social security and phone numbers, but, rather, identity in terms of what the internet has shaped the word to mean: the face value of a snapshot in which the user has carefully selected and constructed how they look and who they think this image makes them.

I blame the ad team. Since I can’t blame the internet (it’s just too big and powerful, there would be no point) and I can’t blame the young lady (power in numbers… if everyone’s doing it why should I assume that anything is going to happen to me?) Then the only one left to blame is the individual or groups of individuals who thought it was totally justifiable to exploit a) this young lady and b) the lawlessness of the internet to create an image of their brand that makes them young, hip and cool (because they’re internet savy). WHO LET THIS ONE FLY?

It’s unreasonable to assume that regulation of the internet and what takes place on it will every be able to tackle the small individual instances that occur daily. However, I believe that large corporations should be held to a different standard. A standard that prohibits internet identity theft.

Unfortunately, this day will not come until someone does something about the tangled web of laws that supposedly rule the internet.