By Fiona Campbell-Howes

February 9th, 2007

Home Office out of touch with online life

Home Office out of touch with online life

Statements made by the Home Secretary this week reveal that the government is frighteningly out of touch with the way people use the internet.

As part of the government’s drive to crack down on paedophilia and other sex offences, offenders may be forced to list their ‘online identity details’ – such as email addresses and chatroom usernames – on the Sex Offenders Register, John Reid said.

“If we did that we would then be able to set up mechanisms that would flag up anyone using those addresses or those identities to make approaches and contacts through some of the very popular internet spaces which are used by kids,” Reid told the BBC.

Any regular internet user will recognise this as nonsense. One person can have many email addresses, and can create a new one in minutes. Inventing a new username is as easy as thinking of a word and typing it into a box. A recent BBC story revealed that kids think nothing of creating a whole new online identity if they can’t remember the password for the old one.

Online identities aren’t unique, either. I share a username with a teenage MySpace user in Kansas, among other people. If he commits a crime, I don’t want to be punished for it. I’m sure he’d say the same about me.

Identity on the internet is a very fluid and unstable thing. Using screen names and email addresses as a basis for identifying people in real life should not be enshrined in law. Instead, the government should focus on helping young and vulnerable people to recognise and deal with suspicious online behaviour. However, I very much fear that young people are far more clued up about online life than anyone at the Home Office.