Two nurses in Lake Geneva, Washington have been fired from their jobs at Mercy Walworth Medical Center for allegedly photographing a patient and posting the pictures on the Internet. Why, you might ask, did these women take a photo of a patient and place it on the Internet? Because the patient happened to be a man with a sex device stuck up his rectum, and the picture was an X-ray.

 If you don’t see the humor, don’t worry — neither did the Walworth County Sheriff’s Department. An investigation was launched after the nurses’ coworker made an anonymous call alerting the Sheriff’s Department that a nurse took pictures of a patient with her cell phone and posted them on her Facebook page. “There were two nurses that independently took a picture each of an X-ray of a patient,” Walworth County Undersheriff Kurt Picknell said.

 According to police, the patient had been admitted to the emergency room with an unknown object wedged in his rectum. When the nurse was questioned, she explained that she and a co-worker had taken the photos at the center of the matter once they realized the object was in fact a sex toy. The police discovered discussion of the photo and incident on the nurse’s Facebook page, but the actual image itself was not posted.

 Further investigation by local police has not turned up the photo, and no witnesses have come forward in the case. The nurse has since deleted her Facebook account, and Picknell has referred the case to the FBI. “We’ve notified federal authorities of this allegation to see if there are federal violations, most notably HIPAA violations, patient rights,” he said.

The popular news and comment forum site Topix has recently come into the mainstream media and legal spotlights for its part in what may be a revolution in anonymous speech across the Internet. 

What began as an open forum discussing the published allegations against a Texas couple in their rural town quickly spiraled into something much, much more heated. Even thought the couple was ultimately found not guilty on charges of sexual assault, comments were flying fast and furious across the forums accusing the couple of everything from pedophilia to drug abuse.

In an effort to combat these postings, the Texas couple became the latest case in a recent spate of folks who are suing the Internet. Turning their attentions to Topix, they are suing the site to release information about individual commenters and their identities. The 365 page lawsuit identities 178 anonymous commenters, individuals alleged to have posted defamatory comments about the couple. The couple is basing their complaint on the claims that the posts lead to a sullying of their reputations online, as well as causing a downturn in their offline businesses. Since Topix allows both registered and unregistered comments to be posted on its forums, it is likely that much of the information will be nothing more than IP addresses, which will then have to be tracked back to individual ISPs to identify actual users.

Reputation.com CEO, Michael Fertik, spoke to ABCNews.com about the current state of law, saying “The law as it currently stands is an accomplice because it creates no incentive whatsoever for Web sites to review or police themselves from content that is potentially devastating to real people and real lives.” Basically, Topix has no obligation under current laws to take down the offensive content, and without a change to the current laws governing free speech on the Internet the law essentially enables anonymous online defamation.

A quick survey of the case law in this area reveals that the law is certainly evolving. In 2008, two students at Yale Law School won a court case that ordered AutoAdmit.com, a college and graduate school admissions Web forum, to reveal the IPs of anonymous posters who libeled the women online. Three years prior a Delaware court denied a request to unmask a blogger charged with defamation by a local councilman. There is certainly no hard and fast rule about free speech and the Internet, but the general consensus is that if anonymous comments are found to be defamatory by a court, that court can command the Web site to supply any significant information it has about the posters.

In the world of social media, things move quickly. What could be the next hot start-up can fold overnight without so much as a final tweet. Considering this, social networking giants MySpace and Facebook, founded in 2003 and 2004 respectively, are like the wise elders of social media. They each have massive user bases and huge amounts of capital for innovation. The only question is, what are they innovating toward? A recent article at MSNBC.com from the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona discussed the role that cell phone and wireless technology will play in the future of social networking .

From the article:

Everybody at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona wanted to be the new best friend of the social networks.

From the world’s biggest phone maker, Nokia, to tiny Irish semiconductor start-up Movidia, delegates to the wireless industry’s biggest annual gathering couldn’t stop talking about Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

The piece goes on to cite specific examples of social networking and wireless integration.

MySpace announced deals at the fair with Nokia and Palm, who will adapt some of their phones to make uploading pictures or video to the social network a matter of a single push of a button.

The company is confident that most smartphone makers will feature MySpace in the coming year.

The so-called Facebook phone or Social Mobile made by INQ, a spin-off of Hutchison Whampoa’s 3, won handset of the year award from the show’s hosts, the GSM Association — and everyone involved was eager to claim a share of the credit.

“Qualcomm’s integrated chipset technology and BREW software have enabled INQ… to realize the potential in mobile social networking,” gushed Enrico Salvatori, the head of chipmaker Qualcomm’s operations in Europe.

Of course, while the widespread integration of social networking and cellular technology will greatly change how people communicate, there are a number of possible drawbacks. Issues of privacy, already a problem because of cameraphones, will become even more of a hot topic. The speed in which information can spread across the Internet is already mind-boggling. Imagine what it would be like if all standard issue cell phones came with Internet options that are as powerful and easy to use as a desktop computer.

Whether or not wireless and social media take off in the way that many people expect, it’s just one more reason to take a pro-active stance in managing your online reputation.

We’ve written about the dangers of identity theft on Facebook at Reputation.com Blog before, but this post from the SNOsoft Research Team Blog takes the issue to a whole new level. Written by Adriel Desautels, CTO of Netragard, L.L.C, a network and information security firm, the post explains how Facebook users can be easily duped into exposing their company to attack.

From the article:

Lets start off by talking about the internet and identity. The internet is a shapeless world where identities are not only dynamic but can’t ever be verified with certainty. As a result, its easily possible to be one person one moment, then another person the next moment. This is particularly true when using internet based social networking sites like Facebook (and the rest).
Humans have a natural tendency to trust each other. If one human being can provide another human with “something sufficient” then trust is earned. That “something sufficient” can be a face to face meeting but it doesn’t always need to be. Roughly 90% of the people that we’ve targeted and successfully exploited during our social attacks trusted us because they thought we worked for the same company as them.

The author goes on to explain in vivid detail the method by which he and his team were able to successfully infiltrate their client’s defenses. By posing as an employee of the company, and becoming Facebook friends with actual employees, the hackers were able to trick their “colleagues” into clicking a link which took them to a fake website, a tactic commonly known as phishing. The information provided through the phising site gave the hackers access to nearly all of the company’s network.

We used those credentials to access the web-vpn which in turn gave us access to the network. As it turns out those credentials also allowed us to access the majority of systems on the network including the Active Directory server, the mainframe, pump control systems, the checkpoint firewall console, etc. It was game over, the Facebook hack worked yet again.

While Mr. Desautels was working to protect his client, there is not much stopping dangerous hackers from utilizing this method for their own means. This is why, more than ever, it is important to be proactive in protecting your online reputation. In many ways, the Internet is like the new wild west. Identity theft, defamation, and slander run rampant with scarce oversight and little legal recourse for victims. Taking care of your online reputation and showing discretion in social networking is key to protecting your identity in the information age.

Turns out that all of Facebook’s privacy limitations make it difficult to remove your personal information even when you’ve passed from the living world and go to the big social network in the sky.

Search Engine Watch had this little blurb about a well known journalist’s profile and his sister’s fight to have it removed from the social networking giant.  Sadly it seems to be another hiccup in a set of privacy policies that are highly inadequate for a Facebook platform that aggregates an eye-popping amount of personal data and then surfaces it to external applications, mashup sites and advertisers.  If you want to step up your privacy on Facebook take a look at our recommended Facebook privacy settings.