The Harvard Crimson has an interesting piece depicting the total gullibility of the current generation, Harvard students included. The article states:
The service, initially called “Harvard Marriage Pact,” solicited a wealth of personal information, including respondents’ racial and sexual preferences, their views on abortion, and their sexual experience. The service’s website and social media presence disappeared without explanation before the date it was supposed to announce matches, prompting students to believe they were scammed.
And of course many students filled in all of this personal data and then nothing. The individual profiling frankly could have been done by anyone. It was a spoof by some MIT students and the article notes:
In an emailed statement, Kronman wrote that he created the matchmaking service as an amusing experiment to see how many Harvard students he could dupe. “One afternoon I thought, ‘how many Harvard students could I convince to fill out a long questionnaire to find the love of their life in less than a week?’” Kronman wrote. “We had no intention to match people or use their data maliciously (we maintain the latter). Instead we wanted to send out a joke match.” Though Kronman said he initially had no intention to match respondents with compatible partners, he changed his mind.
What the legality of this is will yet to be determined but what it shows is that even the elite Harvard students will on the one hand complain about privacy and on the other hand provide a stranger with their most intimate personal details.
Psych profiling was started by the KGB years ago, and then the CIA tried its hand with less than sterling results. But the current expert in Psych profiling is Facebook. Thus these students were already primed to reveal to some unknown their most secret traits.
Interesting.
But Facebook is not the problem, the Internet is certainly not the problem, the problem is the attitude of these younger people who are generally clueless and willing to share anything with some anonymous entity. Decades ago mothers told their children to beware of strangers. Perhaps mothers should extend this to cyberspace. Despite the NY Times writers who opine on general nonsense. The above story is totally reflective of the problem.
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