Nice Atlantic article on the growing digital opportunities to lie, but the checks which stop most of us from doing so
"Research suggests that the expanding opportunities we’ve created for
dishonesty are balanced by another expansion: the increased potential
for getting caught. Just ask cruise enthusiast Cathy Wrench Cashwell. Or
Manti Te’o, the college-football star whose cancer-stricken
“girlfriend” was recently revealed, via social media, to have been an
elaborate hoax. Or the many high-school students whose unoriginal work
has been identified through plagiarism-detection software, and whose
cheating has been detected by data analysis of exam results. Or David
Petraeus, whose affair with his biographer was brought to light, in
part, by e‑mail metadata.
If the director of the CIA can be caught in a lie, anyone can. More
than ever before, our communications leave trails. Whether we imagine
them to be “digital exhaust,” as many tech theorists do, or fodder for a
bits-based Big Brother, as Orwell might have, our Facebook timelines
and e‑mail chains and cellphone logs are leaving copious and minutely
detailed records of our lives. Which means that the claims we make about
ourselves, from the big to the banal, can, as never before, be
cross-referenced against reality. Stuck in traffic? This real-time map
suggests otherwise. Never got the e‑mail? The sender’s read receipt begs
to differ. You’re 25? That was true, a Google search says—five years
ago."
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