Online Safety – A Point That Can Stand To Be Made Again

For those of us whose lives are heavily affected by trauma, the damage done to our ability to connect with or feel a connection to another person can be a devastating consequence to live with.

We are caught between the human need for connection and an ingrained fear of the pain that connection can inflict on us if we open ourselves to it. We may even feel that allowing ourselves to be that vulnerable to another person is an actual impossibility.

This is no doubt why so many of us are drawn to the online community. The personal-yet-anonymous structure of online communication often feels like a safer environment within which to experiment with the risk and desire of forming a connection, however limited, with other people.

This new opportunity for connection is a great thing… and yet, it is also more vulnerable to misuse or abuse than the older, less anonymous methods of communication.

The internet is the first means of creating and maintaining an entire relationship that involves little or no actual human contact. We don’t have to see each other’s faces, we don’t have to hear each other’s voices… all of our contact can happen through an electronic medium.

This sounds great for those of us who have a hard time feeling safe or secure when we’re actually with other people – but this faceless, voiceless, almost-anonymous form of communication opens the door to all manner of misuse.

For one thing, the constraints and the accountability of being “in public” are generally not present in online interaction. There is nobody around to see us doing whatever we’re doing – no witnesses to connect our actions with our identities. Most online interactions are occurring while we are each in the privacy of our own homes, the one place above all others where most people feel least constrained to act in keeping with socially acceptable standards.

And, online interactions can feel private even if another person is in the room while they’re occurring, or even if the participant is sitting in a public place. Most of the time, there is only one person who can see what’s happening on the computer screen at any given time, and windows can be minimized or hidden from view with a simple click. Online interactions can happen in the middle of a crowd with little or no danger of being seen or overheard doing something you shouldn’t be (or wouldn’t want to be caught) doing.

This “being public in private” dynamic, together with the anonymity of online interactions, creates a unique atmosphere of bizarre and excessive permissiveness. People will say and do things online that they would never in a million years do to someone’s face, or never do if they thought there was even a remote likelihood that it could be connected back to them.

This can be good, for all the reasons that survivors feel safer “speaking” online than in person, but it can also be bad. Some of the things people would never do if they knew they could be held accountable for it, should really never be done.

People engage in some pretty disturbing behavior in the virtual free-for-all of the internet, and your own common sense is the only protection you have in surfing the internet safely.

This is incredibly important to remember. The legal world is still stumbling to catch up to modern technology. Prosecution is tricky in a world where there are no regulations enforcing quality control or accuracy of any of the information provided, where nobody has to be who they say they are, and the same identity can hide behind fifteen different screen names that claim to be unrelated. And most times, legal prosecution won’t even be an option.

We are our first and only line of defense in protecting ourselves from being used or taken advantage of, even in minor ways, in online interactions. If we are too quick to believe the first thing we read, too quick to buy a sob story, too quick to support something we don’t fully understand, too quick to assume that face value is full value – we can cause ourselves a lot of trouble and heartache.

Our online “friendships”, however intimate they may feel, are still lacking some of the basic elements that create actual intimacy – primary among these being, the ability to really trust the other person, or even to be sure that they are trustworthy. A true level of intimate trustworthiness is impossible to establish in the sterile, faceless online environment – simply because of the staggering amount of space that exists for deception and lies.

People tweak the truth all the time to present themselves in what they think is their best light, but in real life, we are constrained in how much we can do that. In the first place, there are certain aspects of the truth we can’t really tweak at all, because anyone who sees us would see the lie. For example – in real life, we can’t say we’re female in order to gain acceptance with a group of women if in fact we are a heterosexual male just looking for a target – but this can (and does) happen online all the time.

And even beyond the obvious, most people still won’t depart too far from the truth when what they say can be connected directly to them, their real and actual identities – the potential risk of getting caught is much higher for in-person interactions, and the potential consequences can be much more serious. But even when the consequences are merely public exposure and embarrassment, the fear of having that embarrassment directly connected to us is enough to serve as an effective deterrent for most people.

However, neither of these factors apply to online interaction. In the online world, there is nothing to prevent a person from lying about every single aspect of themselves. And while most of us don’t go quite so far, studies of online behavior have shown that everyone tends to tweak the truth a little more online than they would in a face to face relationship – because they can get away with more. They may purposely omit physical issues that could never be hidden in real life (such as a physical characteristic or physical disability or illness), or they may purposely omit details of their lives that they would not be able to hide so easily in real life (such as a spouse), or they may purposely misrepresent information because they feel secure that nobody reading online will have any chance of recognizing the lie, or of knowing who was spreading the lie even if it is exposed.

People online can lie about even the most basic things, like gender or age or location – things we would know without even having to ask if we met them in person. There is no way to be sure that an online acquaintance is telling the truth about anything. So a truly intimate and trustworthy relationship is literally impossible in the virtual sphere.

Common sense would suggest, then, that we be even more cautious of online information and stories and acquaintances and interactions than we are of the the people and information we come across in the real world – because so much more can be hidden online, and what we don’t know about online acquaintances can hurt us deeply. The “safety” of online interaction is truly an illusion.

And yet, paradoxically, when we go online, we tend to be more trusting, less cautious, less discriminating in what we believe or what we accept, than we would be of in-person experiences – and in the process, we set ourselves up for all kinds of trouble.

Some people go way too far in what they do online. And there will always be some saps who will fall for a line of crap, no matter how outrageous it is. And they are all milling around together in an environment that imposes neither responsibility or accountability. As you might imagine, this breeds a thousand new disasters, large and small, every day.

We don’t want to be one of the disasters. Even if it affects nobody but us – we really don’t need the headaches this can cause us. A little awareness as we surf, a little less willingness to assume that we are always seeing or being told the truth and a little more willingness to check things out for ourselves instead of accepting someone else’s words without any real idea of how valid or true they are – in other words, a little common sense – can go a long way in terms of self-protection.

(This includes my words – don’t just believe me because I’ve posted my words online! If I say something and you question it, or even if I say something and it makes sense to you – check it out for yourself. I’m a person, not an oracle, and I encourage people to inform themselves and think for themselves. The time to worry is when someone tries to discourage us from checking out the facts – or even worse, when there aren’t any facts to check out. If you can’t verify the facts of a story independent of the person telling it to you, then you invest your belief at your own risk.)

Let your common sense protect you so you can surf safely!