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An infidelity informant has outed a woman whom he claims to have overheard laughing about cheating on her partner.
According to the man’s Facebook post, he was standing in line at the coffee machine of a filling station in Chester, England, when he overheard the woman in front of him.
He claims she was talking to a man about how she told “David” that she’d be in a meeting all day at work.
She wasn’t, the shamer said. Instead she was in front of him, laughing about the lie.
At some point, he told The Mirror, even a hotel was brought up in the conversation.
So what did the overhearer do? He climbed aboard his very high horse and shared everything he knew about the woman, in a note publicly posted to the attention of “David”, on Facebook.
David. If your Girlfriend/wife is mid 40’s, went to work this morning wearing a black skirt, black tights and a light blue shirt.. She told you she was in a meeting all day with work. She isn’t, she’s currently stood in front of me at the costa coffee [sic] machine in Chester Shell garage, telling another man this whole story whist [sic] they’re laughing about it. Oh she also drives a black Ford Fiesta with the Reg [redacted]. Pack your stuff and get yourself gone Dave 😁.
As you can see, the man’s exposure of what he assumed was a cheating stranger included a good deal of information about her: her age range, what she was wearing, her car model and color, and even her car’s registration number, which we’ve redacted.
There’s good reason for that redaction: namely, we still have vivid memories of that woman who “outed” a guy for supposedly taking photos of her kids but who was in reality taking a goofy selfie in front of a Darth Vader cut-out.
In that case, by the time the woman’s post had been shared 20,000 times, the Australian man had received death threats and was considering his legal options.
After he came forward and told police the real story, the tables turned, and the mob turned on the woman who had posted allegations about the man.
In this case, the shamer’s post about the supposedly cheating woman went up on Wednesday. By Friday, 23,000 people had reacted to it.
It had been shared 8,478 times and had garnered 2,131 comments, some of which had some choice words for the poster. “Metrosexual grass” stands out. The meaning isn’t clear, but the poster explained that, no surprise here, it wasn’t complimentary.
However, far more people were cheering his action. One poster dubbed him the unofficial king of Brazil, and he posted on Facebook about being interviewed for many articles and multiple radio shows.
As of Monday, neither the allegedly cheating woman nor “David” had stepped forward.
At Naked Security, we regularly report on social media posts, like this one, that instigate vigilantism.
The targets are often hard, or impossible, to sympathize with: paedophiles whose street addresses are publicly posted on Facebook, for example, or groups that foment violent racism and hatred, such as when Anonymous e-hijacked Twitter accounts and websites of the white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
Those are just a few examples but instances of mob justice are legion.
Still the Melbourne man is a clear example of why we should restrain ourselves from prejudging via social media, or of fomenting vigilantism, and should instead trust the law to investigate and mete out justice, as the local police requested in Melbourne regarding the Darth Vader case.
And it’s a very good example of why posting details – including a vehicle registration number – that can lead vigilantes straight to somebody is irresponsible.
Was the woman in line at the coffee shop guilty of infidelity?
It doesn’t matter. It’s not an issue that should concern strangers.
And it’s no excuse to make somebody vulnerable to persecution, be it online or in real life.
“The meaning isn’t clear”
Tattletale of questionable manliness. See “Supergrass (informer)” on wikipedia.
OK, got it, thanks: it sounds like a mixture of Japan’s “Metrosexual Grass-eaters” and the “Supergrass” tattletales that you refer to. http://www.shavemagazine.com/politics/The-Soushoku-Danshi
Wouldn’t it be great if the whiny wuss had stumbled upon a movie set and will someday see himself on the big screen with his nose (literally) in someone else’s fictional business.
The license plate was a bit to much, but I’m more likely to believe he was supporting his community and fellow man. The police will never investigate infidelity unless there is a murder.
“Fellow man” indeed: do you think he would have done the exact same thing if the person he was eavesdropping on and judging so nastily had BEEN a “fellow man”? I’m inclined to think Not…
I guess we know where you stand on infidelity.
It has nothing to do with how I feel about infidelity, just how I feel abut double standards for men and women doing the exact same thing. I guess we know where you stand on that reality…
My mother wisely said “Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.” He should not have posted anything.
Well said Lisa. This situation reminds me of the well-meaning but naive “Let’s create a worm to patch all those insecure systems out there” kind of nonsense. The problem is collateral damage. And that’s why we have the police and justice system.
A few comments.
First, this will get even more interesting once we have facial recognition. Just take a picture (or in the future when we have Glasses back) and it might just link right to them.
Second, their description and car license/registration number is not PII in and of itself, I believe.
Third, it’s absolutely true that someone may have misheard something else. Perhaps she was talking about someone else, paraphrasing, rehearsing a part.
Worse yet, what if the person overhearing this just made it up? Definitely can do that by listening to some innocent conversation.
The way I see it is if she is talking loudly enough for anyone to hear and bragging about it, she deserves whatever she gets. It is called Karma and the man that overheard and posted it on social media is the deliverer of that Karma.
Yeah but let the punishment be on the same level of the dirty deed. If someone came and killed her or harmed her in some way it doesn’t fit the deed anymore.
The vehicle registration mark (if applied to individuals and not organisations) is considered by the Information Commissioner to be personal data.
This document doesn’t explicitly mention number plates, but it’s an interesting read nevertheless. The acid test seems to be, “Can people use the data to figure out who it is?”
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1554/determining-what-is-personal-data.pdf
Yeah, plates are a touchy subject. It’s information I can glean from you legally and without any effort, really. Once my intention is, and I attempt to do things like query DoT or ask the police to use their system to link that to someone specifically does it usually become PII.*
That’s really the elephant in the room with PII discussions and data traders in the backrooms. You can usually just pretend you don’t do these things, and you can get away with considering it not PII. But what about front-ended crowd-sourced identification and vigilantism? Definitely the main question of the article, despite the plate/PII discussion. We might start talking about how libel/slander lead to defamation in the legal system. But for that, we need to de-anonymize…
*Obviously this probably changes wildly from nation to nation in relation to corporate vs government vs personal privacy laws. Europe tends to be far stricter, for instance.
In England, private parking companies can use cameras to track you into and out of a parking lot, and if there’s no record of you having bought a ticket after you’ve left (you have to type your rego into the pay-and-display machine)…
…they buy your name and home address from the licensing agency and send you an invoice, using stills from the camera footage to show your car entering and leaving.
Fair enough to expect people to pay for parking, but kind of creepy to get invoiced by a parking bot with access to your home address.
Case by Case basis. Something like this story, it’s best to ignore the supposed lying, cheating hoochie. NOW if I saw someone getting the living crap beat out of them or someone was in grave danger in anyway. This “Stranger” would help out in a instant and it would concern me to NOT look the other way.