False profiles of professors with an offensive and disparaging content are often appearing on the internet.
Recently, the professors from the Skopje high school “Rade Jovchevski-Korchagin” were unpleasantly surprised and shocked when false profiles of them, along with photographs and details from their private life appeared on the social networking websites.
The indecent and obscene content, that was publicly posted on the “Hi5” portal without them even being aware of this, not only disturbed the employees in the school, but has also seriously damaged their reputation. The professors, who accidentally found out about the abuse, reported the case to the Directorate for Personal Data Protection and the case was recently resoved. The profiles were completely removed from the website, along with the offensive content.
The employees of “Korcagin” are wondering if the school’s students are responsible for this distasteful joke, or maybe people who simply wanted to damage the school’s reputation.
According to the school’s principal, Dragan Arsovski, this happened a few months ago when he heard that there is a false profile of him on the “Hi5” portal, as well as profiles of several of his colleagues-professors. The shock was even greater when they took a look at the profile with offensive content.
“Someone used our photographs, posted texts with vulgar contents, in which, allegedly, I am describing myself with humiliating words. We accidentally found out about this from friends who saw the profiles on the internet. We sent complaints to the portal on three occasions, but we did not get a reply from them. Then we wrote an official letter to the Directorate for Personal Data Protection, and the internet profiles were removed three days after they intervened” – Arsovski shared his unpleasant experience.
The representatives from the Directorate for Personal Data Protection confirm that these obscene profiles of professors from the schools in Skopje, their photographs and texts with vulgar content about their private life are appearing more and more often on the internet, particularly on the teenagers’ social networking websites.
The Directorate received a notification from a Skopje high school that an abuse of the personal data of the professors has been done on one of the social networking portals, thereby offending their personality, as well as the school’s reputation. Each of the profiles contained personal data, name and surname, gender and age data, as well as other offensive and disparaging content”, explain from the Directorate.
The “creative authors” have even published personal descriptions, testimonies and photographs of the persons on behalf of whom they have created the profile, where they posted false details about the private life of the members of the families of these people, as well as false information about their professional life.
“The portal’s section for communication between registered users was used for entering false communication between the professors, alleged examination postponements, false communication with the students, but in most cases the content was utterly vulgar”, say from the Directorate. Although this is a portal registered in the US, for which the Directorate does not have the authority to instigate a procedure, they reacted promptly and the profiles were immediately removed.
“This kind of violation of the professors’ privacy is actually a mass phenomenon in the elementary and high schools in the country and this is why we are calling on everybody that notices such posts of personal data on some of the social networking portals, to immediately notify the Directorate for Personal Data Protection so that this content could be quickly removed”, say from the Directorate.
The schools, on the other hand, are taking even more and more measures to protect themselves after this unpleasant experience. So, as the director of “Korcagin” says, they have now placed a protection on their servers and a ban for visiting the social networking websites. Hence, students can only visit websites that would really be useful to them while in class.
“Since we are aware that this can happen again, we have initiated trainings for the students as well as advice to help them understand what kind of problems and complications they may encounter if they publicly post their personal data, phone numbers and address of living”, says Arsovski, who also doesn’t exclude the possibility that the profiles could have been created by someone older, and that the content may have been already posted publicly, before the students actually joined.
Author: Daniela Trpchevska
