Wolf In Sheeps Clothing

Yesterday's snafu was a certainly unexpected and definitely a little bit embarrassing. I'm a reasonably intelligent person and and super-nerd to boot, so I don't generally expect to fall pray to most forms of online deception. Luckily, the organic web and it's little darling the blogosphere are quick to react and the information was corrected quickly enough (mind you I am surprised anyone knew to tell ME!).

The problem is the lack of context for the recipient which opens the door to misinformation and deception. In this case, I believe there are two primary factors that make a "hack" or any other maligned activity possible, Incomplete Comprehension and Incomplete Evaluation.

Incomplete Comprehension

This really is a reflection on the recipient's ability to digest the information presented to them. The other day I recieved a spoofed e-mail from some spammer that claimed to be from Citibank. They indicated that some information was required of me and that I should click the link in the message. This is not a new hoax, previously it was Ebay, PayPal, Insert Major Entity Name Here, etc. When I received the message, I immediately looked to see where the link went to. I also recall wondering how many people get caught by this -- wouldn't your average person just click on the link (assuming their SPAM filters had let this message through already)?your average.

And such is the nature of a Comprehension Hack. Lacking the domain of knowledge to discern how something "should" work, it's easy to fall victim to a betrayal of this nature. This is, naturally, not limited to online trickery but also to a thousand other real-world scenarios, from the office to the car lot. The problem is there isn't a solid solution beyond the tyipcal "Awareness" campaign that warns of "suspicious" behavior and provides details of previous hacks. But where does the average person find this type of information? Why aren't there more pages like the this one at CraigsList?

Some might argue that we fight deception with education. I would argue that's quite possible the opposite of the solution. Comprehension is too expensive and sometimes impossible. We could never assume to reach enough people to educate them on the eide subject matters that open the doors for this type of activity. Alerts are simplified and summarized -- two critical traits of anything easy to understand and immediately actionable.

Alerts are already growing in importance to our lives and technologies like RSS will only make their effectiveness more pervasive. Just think, we have alerts for everything from virii (biological, computer), to missing children (Amber Alert), to terrorists (Homeland Security). Unfortunately, most of this information is hidden away and if you stopped your average person on the street you would hard pressed to get actionable information. But what about the Social Virus? Where's the alert? How do we protect ourselves?

So we've got two homework items I think: 1) design a system that streamlines the creation, location and distribution of Alerts to the world audience 2) start to catalog and expose the wild social hacks that are flourishing in the wild and look more seriously at how these things are spreading. I'm interested in starting this now at socialalerts.com, who wants to help out?

Incomplete Evaluation

Whereas comprehension addresses my ability to understand the information presented to me, my evaluation of that information is often tied to the source. Information received from a suspect source is easier to dismiss than information from a reliable one. Information from a trusted, insider source is almost always evaluated.

The problem here is two-fold. On the one hand there is a compromise of your authority figure, on the other there is a corruption of context.

In terms of your authority figure, if they receive information that they deem to be true, they may report, publish or otherwise distribute that information to their audience or network. As your respect, confidence, and trust for the source increases, our tendency to accept information as factual increase. The system then cycles and the behavior is replicated, annotated, or otherwise disseminated over and over again.

In terms of the corruption of context, this is a side-effect of our delivery mechanisms. Often we are rushed or otherwise harried as we deliver new information. We have devised many ways to get this information from one place to the next, not limited to phones, voicemail, e-mail, web sites, blogs and rss. The problem arises when information is shorted or concatenated into a more digestable form. During this process, compromises are made and, often enough, the end product does not wholly convey the same meaning. RSS generators are especially responsible for this as they often generate excerpts on the fly. However, the technology alone is not to blame as it is us, the reader, that fails to investigate the information further. As Scott Allen notes in the comments of the Orkut post:

Add to that the whole RSS summary issue, and, well — I imagine that many who saw this headline in their RSS reader didn’t come read the article, so no telling how many people are going to quit using orkut simply because they didn’t investigate the story any further than a headline and a one-paragraph summary.

Source: User Comments, "Orkut.com turns out to be a master's thesis project?"

Yesterday's Orkut fiasco could be classified mostly as an Incomplete Evaluation. I originally read the entry on Many 2 Many and was quickly excited at the news. Trusting the authors of the site, I chose to then post my own view on the matter. As we have found out, of course, the entry I posted on was based on some information from another party. I had visited the source pointed out by Seb, however, that source was also incomplete. Only later would I find out that a very important last sentence was missing indicating the press release was meant to be humor and not real.

In many many industries and enterprises, there are a wide number of failsafes and precautions in place to prevent potentially damaging actions from occurring. In the blogging world, at least, there are far fewer constraints for the time. As Scott asks later in his comment, "So, what’s our responsibility in this sort of thing as blogger/journalists?". I don't know either, but responsibility is the key and it's up to us not to be wolves.