The woman who dressed up as a victim of the Boston Marathon Bombing is paying for her mistake.
She claims she was portraying a survivor of the attack, but that isn't what the general public saw. Even I thought it was as tasteless a costume as the teenaged trick or treater who came to my house dressed as a terrorist in 2001. (I didn't say anything, I handed him his candy and politely told him to have a nice night. I figured he wanted his costume to make people angry and I refused to fall for it.)
I won't say the woman's name here, as it's already in the article, but this is one case where she incited the ire of the public by making a foolish mistake. People have located a lot of her personal info and she is receiving horrible things in her snail mail as well as death threats. She lost her job after this debacle found its way to her employer.
She is being cyberbullied, basically.
This goes to show how easy it is to find your personal info online, and how anything you do on the web can haunt you forever. That is why you should be careful what you share with the internet. The wrong people can do a lot with just your email address. Some people call this "doxing" someone. It's very easy to do if you know how. Sometimes all somebody needs is your email address to locate all the websites you're signed up for.
If your name is Jane Doe Smith and your email is something like [email protected], then all someone has to do is go to a place like http://pipl.com and type in your email, and it will pull up everything tied to that email address. Facebook profiles usually come up first right there with personal websites. Someone can get your last name off your Facebook(another reason my real surname isn't on my Facebook!) and if your personal website is registered to a domain you pay for, they can find your info by running a whois search on your domain. It is incredible what people can dig up on you.
I hope this gives you a good dose of paranoia. Cyberbullies use this info to torment and harass their targets.
More on "doxing" here.
I will not say this woman deserves what she is getting. I'm sure she thought her costume was great and that people were going to understand the meaning behind it, however she was wrong and she brought this onto herself by not thinking her costume through. Her life is going to be a nightmare for a long time. I feel bad that she has to learn how cruel the internet can be the hard way.
She claims she was portraying a survivor of the attack, but that isn't what the general public saw. Even I thought it was as tasteless a costume as the teenaged trick or treater who came to my house dressed as a terrorist in 2001. (I didn't say anything, I handed him his candy and politely told him to have a nice night. I figured he wanted his costume to make people angry and I refused to fall for it.)
I won't say the woman's name here, as it's already in the article, but this is one case where she incited the ire of the public by making a foolish mistake. People have located a lot of her personal info and she is receiving horrible things in her snail mail as well as death threats. She lost her job after this debacle found its way to her employer.
She is being cyberbullied, basically.
This goes to show how easy it is to find your personal info online, and how anything you do on the web can haunt you forever. That is why you should be careful what you share with the internet. The wrong people can do a lot with just your email address. Some people call this "doxing" someone. It's very easy to do if you know how. Sometimes all somebody needs is your email address to locate all the websites you're signed up for.
If your name is Jane Doe Smith and your email is something like [email protected], then all someone has to do is go to a place like http://pipl.com and type in your email, and it will pull up everything tied to that email address. Facebook profiles usually come up first right there with personal websites. Someone can get your last name off your Facebook(another reason my real surname isn't on my Facebook!) and if your personal website is registered to a domain you pay for, they can find your info by running a whois search on your domain. It is incredible what people can dig up on you.
I hope this gives you a good dose of paranoia. Cyberbullies use this info to torment and harass their targets.
More on "doxing" here.
I will not say this woman deserves what she is getting. I'm sure she thought her costume was great and that people were going to understand the meaning behind it, however she was wrong and she brought this onto herself by not thinking her costume through. Her life is going to be a nightmare for a long time. I feel bad that she has to learn how cruel the internet can be the hard way.
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