Anatomy of a Privacy Nightmare 275
itwbennett writes "Gennette Cordova knows first-hand how impossible it is to erase yourself from the Internet. The 21-year-old college student was the hapless recipient of a photo of a Congressman Anthony Weiner bulging in his boxers. Ms. Cordova then 'watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I've ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.' She then tried to remove her personal information from the web, one social network at a time. But the fact is, 'until a site's Webmaster removes the offending content, it will remain accessible via search engines like Google,' says blogger Dan Tynan."
Re:Alleged picture (Score:5, Informative)
However in this specific case I agree it probably wasn't a real hack. For chrissake he won't even deny the picture was of himself.
Re:Alleged picture (Score:2, Informative)
A picture of a man's junk coming from a guy called "Rep. Anthony Wiener", going to some random student. It sounds like this is in reverse, this is a targeted prank by one of the girl's acquaintances. I mean, the man's name is "Wiener" and there's a picture of a man's gentleman's sausage coming from him, that is too perfect, it sounds like this girl probably rebuffed the advances of the wrong nerd.
It wasn't sent from an account that was simply titled "Rep. Anthony Weiner", it was sent from Rep Anthony Weiner's Twitter account, which is also titled "Rep. Anthony Weiner". It also was not just some random student. It was a student who was following Weiner.
Also, if this were a hack, the FBI should be involved. I know I would want the FBI involved if it was my career on the line. So far, Weiner has refused any FBI involvement and wants to handle the "investigation" by a private firm, one that would be hired and paid by him, of course.
Some more facts:
http://thenewsjunkie.com/2011/05/8-things-you-should-know-about-anthony-weiners-twitter-scandal/ [thenewsjunkie.com]
Pat attention to the Seattle bit and when she called him her "boyfriend".
Re:It wasn't his Tweet (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it says "gaping hole" but it's a safe link and describes technical details of the hack.
I hadn't heard of it yet, so for those who are confused as I was...
Someone frames a congressman by posting a tweet under his name to the woman mentioned in the summary. The tweet included a picture of someone's wiener (not shown in the above blog post). The woman became infamous as the implied scenario was that the congressman was secretly sexting her but accidentally made it a public tweet.
It actually turns out that the guy who "discovered" the pic and spread the news was most likely the same person who uploaded it and planned the whole thing.
Now the woman in the subject has been harassed as a result of being connected to this incident, she tried deleting her twitter account to make it go away but she's permanently tainted from it.
From the blog post above, using the yfrog twitter service can expose you to anonymous 3rd party tweets using your name.