a user says "I lie. And, I don't feel guilt or remorse. When it comes to giving out personal information online, I have the morality of Satan's spawn.
Sometimes I'm Candice and sometimes I go by my soap opera diva name, Ms. Styles.
I usually live in Beverly Hills because I know the zip code is 90210. When asked about income, I am a student who makes $0 to $12,000 a year.
Lying online is not wrong. It's survival."
I have seen this is test after test after test. people give bogus information unless they think it will be useful to them, such as when entering contensts or when buying. otherwise, they don't bother. it's part laziness, part suspicion. i know one user who puts _@_.com in all email form fields. Just enough to validate....
, from oldest to newest:
Absolutely. And I wonder how many processing cycles are consumed at microsoft.com and whitehouse.gov as people spoof bill.gates and president and vice.president, and their mail gets filtered. Twice, or more... first by code, then by human eyes...
And now, playing up my paranoia: I bet this comment is being entered into some Secret Service database because "president" and "whitehouse.gov" are proximal to each other.
Ah... I love suspicion, paranoia, and conspiracy theories. Laziness, too.
Posted by Marc @ 11/28/2001 05:20 AM pst
~~~
Oh yeah. I lie. I lie a LOT.... I never put in bogus emails, though. I always create ones (widgywidgets@openwire.com for Widgywidgets.com and so forth).
Back when I handled abuse management for a company (who shall remain nameless) we had over 60,000 users registered as NAME@NAME.com (where NAME = a common male name).
We had gotten a few emails from the owner of that email address and he was incensed that we (and just about every other service on the internet) were basically sending him loads of crap that he didn't sign up for. Hell, he was lucky we de-duped the list before sending emails to the customer base! If you want your next Unabomber candidate, it's THAT guy...
Once we were alerted to the problem, we immediately instituted email confirmation methods that worked like a charm.
So, no, I don't put in random email addresses anymore. But street addresses and phone numbers? You bet your ass. No one needs to know that information just so I can download a damn spellchecker javascript file!
(Speaking of which, Wodtke, the spellchecker works and it's fabulous...)
Posted by Jay @ 11/28/2001 05:34 PM pst
~~~
My favorite fake email address is
webmaster@ So they can spam themselve...
Posted by Anonymous @ 11/29/2001 10:21 AM pst
~~~
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