Sunday, September 10, 2006
The Seattle Craigslist sex scandal

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Violet Blue has posted a comprehensive roundup of the Craigslist sex scandal making the blog-rounds since last week. Over the weekend, I solicited comment from others known for insight on privacy and life online, and will post their thoughts here as they come in.

For what it’s worth, I think what Jason Fortuny did is shameful and wrong in the extreme. But one obvious moral to this tale: your private information is as intimate as your private parts. There are serious risks to sharing either with strangers you bump into online.

Violet writes:

Last Monday Seattle resident Jason Fortuny [Ed. Note: pictured at left] (and a friend) carried out a thought experiment into reality -- one I think anyone who has surfed Craigslist sex ads has entertained. He took a hardcore Women Seeking Men ad from another city and reposted it to see how many replies he could get in 24 hours (the ad's photo at right). Then he published every single response -- photos, emails, IM info, phone numbers, names, everything, to a public wiki (Encyclopedia Dramatica -- site is up and down, check back if down). Then they went public on Jason's LiveJournal page calling it The Craigslist Experiment, inviting readers to identify the CL ad's responders and add more info ("Your Goal: identify people you know IRL and point them out. We've already had great successes here.") It has turned into quite a meme, getting posted all over the place.

(...) They got 178 responses, with 145 photos of men -- cocks, faces, more; full email addresses (both personal and business addresses), names, and a few IM names and phone numbers. One respondent used a Microsoft employee email address, another used a usar.army.mil (military) email address. They got audio, too. Since then, there has been one copycat in Portland. Respondents have emailed him asking him to take the info down, and he has simply published their requests.

Since then Jason has had *his* private info published to CL and been threatened physically, threatened with lawsuits, and has been hated on by everyone from online BDSM communities to Wired (and I saw he was interviewed by the NY Times on friday Sept. 8, so I wonder what position they'll take on all of this). Wired called him "sociopathic" while commenters are saying things like "Disclosing an email to the public is indeed a violation of privacy, and if anyone has a spine, they will take you down with a massive lawsuit that will make you regret ever doing this. You are a liar, a xenophobe, an asshole, and deserve to have your ass beaten to within an inch of your life."

Link to more on the story.

Reader comment: Anonymous BoingBoing reader says,

I'm writing to you from my real email account in order to demonstrate that I'm for real, but hoping that anything I may say will only be published anonymously.

I am a woman in my early 30s who has used Craigslist in my city to find casual sex, so I took a particular interest in the story of Jason Fortuny.

I tend to agree with Wired News: I think this is a deeply hateful act.

I've posted a few "Casual Encounters" ads at different times looking for various things. The first ad alone received over 300 replies. Some of them were beyond repugnant -- the bestiality proposition springs to mind. The majority were unappealing but mundane -- people who just didn't dance the same way I do, mentally speaking, didn't know how to compose a well-thought-out email or articulate themselves attractively. Those were ones like the one-liner "yo, hit me on MSN", that kind of thing. I received a lot of dickpix. Then, there were a tiny fraction that drew me in and showed me that as much consideration had gone into their reply as I put into my original post. Those were people I connected with, corresponded with (from a gmail account), and eventually met.

As a writer I have put a lot of thought into how I could use these experiences in my work. But even though I have a goldmine of material in my gmail account, I would *never* reveal these people's identities or post their personal information. It simply breaks a very basic implied trust. Now, the situation with Fortuny is different because he's just taking the piss for his own amusement. But I think that makes it even worse.

It's a big ol' world and there are intelligent, worthwhile people in the Craigslist personals... *real* people. They're (mostly!) not much different from you in that we all have the same needs and desires and cravings. This is just one manner of fulfilling them. My experiences have brought me much joy and a small measure of sorrow, but ultimately they have made my life unquestionably richer. The fact that this jagoff thinks that he is above these feelings, that he is pissing all over CL personals posters -- by extension pissing all over me -- is to me simply repugnant.

taken from- http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/10/the_seattle_craigsli.html

Thoughts?