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Column: Identity theft

Who's stolen my ego? An ever-growing number of increasingly annoyed famous people are asking themselves this very question.  Karl Lagerfeld, Peter Sloterdijk, the Dalai Lama, Franz Müntefering, Harald Schmidt. They are all victims of Twitter fraud. The crime? Identity theft.

Here's how it works: Müntefering's double announces his resignation on Twitter - using a completely genuine SPD logo and against the backdrop of the Willy Brandt Haus - days before the "genuine" Müntefering quits.  But which one is the genuine article? The fakes come across as completely genuine. It wasn't just the Welt am Sonntag which believed Peter Sloterdijk's alter ego to be genuine; even his publisher posted a link to the fake account without a second thought.

The genuine articles don't find it at all amusing. I certainly do. We thought that we had found an ungoverned place in cyberspace; we perambulated our egos, free of all the social pressures of the real world, we polished up our web image, indulged ourselves in all sorts of masquerades, assumed whatever roles we fancied.    Now we know: what we can do, others can too - with our identity.

The Internet industry is already on the case. Up to now, it has offered us services to help us assemble our online ego. Help to let us present a professional online identity. But no sooner have you done so than it's been undermined, duplicated, distorted. But it's good for business: new companies immediately sprung up, such as My Image Control, which promises comprehensive tuning of my digital profile. Its "In-depth scan" uncovers undesirable data tracks, cleans them up, deletes them, and, if necessary, organises "positive" entries.

No matter how useful such services may be, the promise of a new culture of breezy self-modification lies shattered. The dream of a surreal realm, free of the pressure to conform, is over. The Web is just like a village square, but with a time lag: all our little secrets eventually come to light to be aped and mocked.

And yet there's a simple, foolproof way to protect against reputational damage. Just spread the word that you shouldn't believe everything you read on the Internet.

Ludwig Hasler