An online manhunt ends when food, of course, gives man away in New Orleans
Privacy is dead in this digital age
Thousands of amateur detectives joined the pursuit. And some real detectives, too: $5,000 is no chump change.
Geek squads logged phone calls and text messages, monitored Ratliff’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, intercepted ATM and credit card receipts as fast as he made the transactions. The widespread but anonymous acts of domestic espionage pretty much serve to confirm the growing sense that personal privacy is a quaint relic of the 20th century, kind of like black-and-white TV and rotary-dial phones.
Still, Ratliff avoided capture. His pursuers organized into a Facebook group called The Search for Evan Ratliff. While thousands actively searched for Ratliff, tens of thousands more turned “Where’s Evan?” into a riveting spectator sport, signing onto their social networks for daily and even hourly Evan updates.
You might also like
|
|
|
|
|
Closing The Gap
Bridging The Gap
This Present Darkness
Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace
Loading ...
http://www.wired.com/vanish/
Vanished and Captured: Recapping the Hunt for Evan Ratliff
How hard is it to shed one’s skin in the age of Facebook and Twitter, and how do investigators track down the thousands of people who do this each year? In the September issue of Wired magazine, contributing editor Evan Ratliff wrote a story about disappearing in the digital age.
When the magazine hit newsstands on August 15, Evan took off, too. Wired offered $5,000 to anyone who could find him, with $3,000 going to Evan if he made it a month undiscovered. To make the hunt fair, I had access to all of Evan’s credit-card, bank and personal accounts, and I posted his transactions and e-mails online. Meanwhile, Evan was required to act like a person who really wanted to start his life over again: He had to create false accounts online, stay in cities and live in a way he would if truly starting life anew.
?Reply