The Anonymous Widower

Reporting Internet Abuse

There has been a lot of reporting lately about cyberbullying and abuse on social networking sites.  In fact the BBC breakfast phone-in was about this subject.

I have no experience of reporting problems on social networking sites, but for years I have been fighting a campaign against on-line fraudsters using the Internet and mobile phones.  I have reported endless people for abuse to e-mail organisations and so have many others I know who work in this field.

No service provider have ever informed me that they have taken serious action. As these scams are still occurring, it would appear that nothing has been done.  I have found that the same e-mail addresses keep coming up in different scams.

Why?

These companies want the traffic to continue and as they run tight ships, they can’t afford the methods that everyone knows would stop all of these practices.

It is exactly the same with social networking sites.  Put a button to report abuse on a site and the abusers will go elsewhere, so a site that does it, will lose traffic and advertising revenue, which is of course geared to traffic.

I also have a granddaughter and she was showing me an innocent site aimed at her age, with educational games, quizzes and puzzles.  There was nothing wrong with the site, but some of the advertising on it, was promoting all the foods and snack products that you shouldn’t give to children of her age.

All of these problems are driven by commercial interests, most of which are headquartered outside of the jurisdiction of the UK and the EU.  So in truth we are just whistling in the dark and the sites will never change. 

All these indignant phone-ins are just free publicity for these social networking sites.  They would have had to pay millions to get the same effect.  I’d love to see how many new members have joined them in the last few days.

November 18, 2009 - Posted by AnonW | Computing, News | Fraud, Internet