I R ANONYMOUS!

So, today the wife got some "hate e-mail" from one of her anonymously from one of her students.

I'm not going to post it, or anything else related to it, but it brings up an interesting point about which I commented on awhile ago.

People believe that they cannot be held accountable for their actions online.

This could not be farther from the truth. Even if you know how to contain your personal information online through management of cookies, downloads, etc, the majority of your online activities are monitored elsewhere.

If you happen to have an email address, even one that you pay for from your service provider, guess what? Your emails are being stored/monitored by your provider. Generally, your ISP does this for backup purposes, so, you know, when you do something to lose all your email, that they can be your savior and restore most, if not all of your email. This goes for any web-based free emails too. But these get more scrutinized, not so much for the "evil, you're going to bomb something" issues, but more for market research and advertising.

What the average person doesn't know is that in every email, blog post, forum post, tweet, Facebook what-have-you, tracking information is logged. Doesn't matter if you use a laptop, desktop, phone, iphone, blackberry, there is enough information logged to determine who posted it, from where, from what computer, and at what time. The majority of this information is hidden and cannot be blocked or otherwise manipulated by anyone other than those providing the service.

So, threaten someone online recently? Send someone a anonymous hate email? Well, you better hope that the recipient doesn't report you. Harassment is a crime. To give you an idea of how easy it is to be caught, most serious cases of email harassment are resolved, even those made "anonymously", with charges laid in less than 24 hours. In some cases, the time required to actually go physically arrest these people is LESS than the time required to determine their identity online.

Food for thought before you randomly go flame someone because nobody will catch you, huh?