Last week, right around the time when Ashley Madison, the website for married people seeking to have affairs, was hacked, I received an email from a dating site informing me that several men had liked my profile and would like to chat with me.
This was odd for at least two reasons. First, I’m happily married, with two children and one on the way, and had never done online dating in any form, even in my single days. Second, the dating website was Our Time, a site for people aged 50 and over to find love, and I’m practically a teenager of 38.
I clicked over to see the profile they imagined to be mine and found that, indeed, someone with the username Miss Markowicz was using four of my pictures on the site.
They had my location as Clear Lake, Wis., and my marital status as “legally separated” (sorry, babe).
I was 6 feet tall, as opposed to 5-4, and 45 years old. I was a sports nut, instead of someone who whined for the channel to be changed during most ball-playing.
It was weird, but I mostly shrugged it off. After all, while it was sad that someone could be “catfished” (being tricked by fake profiles online) using my photos, it really had minimal effect on me.
The poor guy in Clear Lake, Wis., hoping to meet a 6-foot-tall sports fan was wasting his time, sure, but that seemed like the extent of the damage.
My husband wasn’t jealous, possibly even a little proud of all the attention his wife was receiving with her fake profile and, anyway, he knew when we got together that he was signing up for someone who lived a pretty public life.
Like many people my age, I’m an online oversharer. For years, I had a fairly popular blog, mostly about politics but with a heavy dose of the personal.
I wrote about what restaurants I enjoyed, music I was listening to, traveling I was doing and anything else that occupied my mind in that moment.
When I started playing poker as an all-encompassing hobby/job, I started a separate blog for that. Ditto for wedding planning, followed by the inevitable baby blog, of course.
When blogs started to die down in popularity, I took to Twitter and Facebook with zeal.
Twitter was my political outlet while Facebook was my social outlet.
I’m not one of those people who uploads their entire vacation photo album to Facebook, but I certainly post a few photos and/or videos a month of my family, more if we’re doing something memorable. I have over 32,000 tweets.
It’s fair to say I spend a lot of my life online.
Yet the creepy thing about the fake dating profile is that it used several of my photos from my ostensibly private Facebook account.
I try to keep close control of my Facebook profile, but I’ve still managed to amass over 1,200 friends. I tend to only accept people whom I know “in real life.”
Of course, in the early days of Facebook, I accepted anyone who asked, and even today, if someone sends me a nice note saying they enjoyed something I wrote, I tend to press “Accept.”
The big question is whether I’ll be changing anything about my online activity now.
Probably not.
An online life comes with risks, but are they really avoidable? Even if you don’t use Facebook or Twitter or share much about your everyday life, complete online safety just doesn’t exist.
If you’ve purchased a home, your address and the amount you spent are public record.
Do you use LinkedIn to network?
Do you have a picture and bio on your company website?
Have you stored your pictures on a photo-sharing site such as Flickr?
Do you think your emails are completely secure?
What about your shopping habits?
In April, when WikiLeaks released a slew of hacked Sony emails, the online purchases of executive Amy Pascal were revealed.
The personal-care products she’d purchased on Amazon were available for the world to peruse.
Pascal, like many people, probably thought the nature of her online purchases was completely secure.
Then the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management, which contains sensitive, secret information on government employees of all levels, was hacked, possibly by the Chinese government.
The lesson — though it’s not a new one — is that whatever information you share online, you’ve got to be prepared for it to find wider circulation.
Of course, you have every expectation of legal protection if, say, your credit card was stolen. But don’t expect those Facebook filters to save you.
The cheaters of Ashley Madison learned last week that privacy is scarce online — and often simply an illusion.
And I learned I’m a hit with the men of Clear Lake, Wis.