GO HACK YOURSELF

WRITTEN BY izabelle french

Being online is constantly slightly terrifying. Despite the warnings, I’m always putting my silly little email and the password I came up with when I was 13 into a lot of places to get free trials and sign up for newsletters. I’ve been online for a long time, and it wouldn’t take too long to steal my identity.

Thankfully, my lack of position or notoriety has meant that it hasn’t happened that much over my life, but I still routinely check my password and usernames on the Google to make sure that there isn’t any extra information leaking around.

After having my Spotify account hacked and watching a TikTok about data security, I thought maybe it would be a good time to look at what impact I left on the internet, which can be existential, but also good to see if someone is impersonating you or whatnot. And trust me, it does get existential. I’ve been online and posting for over a decade, and the only sign of me in the public eye is a year-old Tweet with 10k likes or whatever. It’s humbling, it’s soul-eating, it’s making me question my place in the world wide web, but it’s not the most interesting thing that happened on this security check up (we’ll get to existential stuff later).

Whiles searching around, I found a link to my Facebook, probably generated via someone looking at my profile from somewhere else. At least that’s what I’m telling myself, so I don’t actually get worried. As expected, Facebook didn’t like this. Externally accessing a website through unintentional means symbolise a weakness, an exploitation. So it took me a while to realise what Facebook thinks I did: I stole my own identity.

Unlike the semi-popular 2014 song “Mask of my Own Face” by Lemon Demon, which positions the idea of stealing your own identity as a chaotic, suave venture where you put everything on yourself while distancing yourself from who “you” are, accidentally posing as yourself on Facebook feels like someone ripping your identity away from you, losing control over who you are.

One must also consider the outsider’s perspective. When Facebook detected I was hacked, it locked my account for a brief window of time, which is fair. If a friend of yours suddenly had their account locked, what does that mean? Are they dead? Have they been hacked? Did they say something racist? Did they anger a racist who are glued to the “Report” button? Or, worst of all, are they just… gone. Forever out of reach, off the grid.

Most friendships disappear, people move, and it’s sad, but at least most of the time you can see their footsteps trailing in a direction further and further from yours. I imagine it’s a pain ineffible when someone you know, someone you’re close to, just disappears, not through death, but is just suddenly not there. Was it your fault? Was this something you couldn’t control? Something so far out of your reach? Why didn’t they tell you about it? Maybe you weren’t as close as you thought you were. There’s no answer that can satisfy you because there is no one to answer. Just questions, floating in an empty void of un-read messages…

I’m almost 100% sure this isn’t what the person who tried to invite me to their birthday party felt, but they were the one to ask about my inaccessible profile first. I, at the time, was blissfully unaware, for I had not accidentally opened Facebook that day. I was having a good day, I went to the movies, and then I got a blip from my Facebook messenger, which was miraculously still up: Izzy’s facebook (has) seemingly dissapeared oop”.

Now I could tell the tale of getting my account back, but that’s just the tried-and-true narrative of finicking with IT. If you want that part of the story, call your internet provider, I’m sure the infuriating energy of glitchy hold music and text-to-speech will be a suitable metaphor. In the end, I got a part of my life back.

Is it one I particularly wanted back? No.