Not quite stalking, but ugly enough…

Here’s a discomfiting case of abuse of a social media site (Facebook, to be precise, though I don’t think there are grounds for one of my patented anti-Facebook rants on this occasion). A teenager in North Sydney has been arrested for an offence under the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act to use a “carriage service” to harass or offend. What this means in this case is that he used a fake profile page to disseminate a teenage girl’s contact details to 200,000 people as a birthday party invitation. See: 

• http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/16/facebook_invitation_hoax/
• http://www.wsbt.com/news/wsbt-australian-charged-over-notsosweet16-party-hoax-20110315,0,7590490.story
• http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/facebook-party-invite-mayhem-youth-could-face-jail-20110316-1bwi3.html

David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
Small Blue-Green World
ESET Senior Research Fellow