Detecting and Preventing Online Identity Deception in Social Networking Services

In the past decade social networking services (SNS) flooded the Web. The nature of such sites makes identity deception easy, offering a quick way to set up and manage identities, and then connect with and deceive others. Fighting deception requires a coordinated approach by users and developers to ensure detection and prevention. This article identifies the most prevalent approaches in detecting and preventing identity deception (from both a user's and developer's perspective), evaluating their efficiency, and providing recommendations to help eradicate this issue.

Identity Deception in SNS

Online identity deception is the deliberate concealment or altering of a sender's true identity to convey that false belief to the receiver⁴ mean-while, the receiver doesn't anticipate the sender's identity tampering. In addition, for deception to take place, an individual shouldn't be expecting that all or part of the information in a message will be concealed or altered.⁵ Some of the objectives behind deception include instrumental (goal-driven), relational (relationship-driven), or identity (for example, protecting a person's reputation).⁶