Craigslist hoax empties house

Okay, a week ago, everyone was actually talking about the problem of false or mistaken identity, responsibility and lawbreaking. That important discussion died down, but the problem goes on. Today, in Tacoma, Wash., people are talking about Craigslist and what a bad thing it can be:

TACOMA -- Many people have had success buying, selling and swapping goods on the Web site craigslist, but one Tacoma woman says she was robbed.

Laurie Raye said she had everything stripped from her home after someone placed a fake ad on the San Francisco-based Internet site, a collection of online classifieds.

“The instigator who published this ad invited the public to come in and vandalize me,” Raye told Seattle television station KING.

Raye had recently evicted a tenant and cleaned out the rental.

Someone, perhaps the evicted tenant, posted an ad on Craigslist saying everything in the house was available for anyone who wanted to stop by and take it. Even the doors and vinyl siding were taken, according to the story.

This isn't a good reason to shut down Craigslist. It will raise questions about what a publisher's liability is with regards to information on their Web site, just as last week everyone was accusing creators of a site of being responsible for vandalism on the site that threatened a female blogger with rape and death.

But there are so many things going on with the Web these days and we soon forget the important issues amidst the flood of pabulum that passes for important news. The Tacoma News Tribune story about the house rip-off manages to dredge up the fact hookers and scams are rampant on Craigslist without mentioning they exist in newsprint and real-world streetcorners, too.

Identity is a problem that will not go away before we move beyond the question of authentication to really being able to tell who someone is. That is, whether behavior attributed to someone online is in line with their actual behavior. If anyone had known the owner of that house and seen the ad saying "take everything," they may have alerted the owner in time to head off the crime.

Identity is relationships, not just logon authentication. We're just to short-sighted to see it.

Disclosure: The author is cofounder of the mysteriously linked Palchemy site in the story.