Of friends and foes...

At a recent get-together, someone inquired about the possible legal ramifications of “friendster hacking”. Soemone hacked into her personal account, changing pertinent personal information and ascribing derogatory character to that person (appearing in the 1st person), and even changing the password of the account so that she would not be able to change it. She claims to know the identity of the hacker, the crazy ex of her boyfriend, who has been hounding them for quite sometime now.

Looking at it, there is an apparent violation here. First, the personal account has been accessed without the consent of the account owner, and has been tampered with. Second, malicious conduct and defamatory character has been imputed publicly upon her person that causes dishonor and embarrassment. For the first problem, access to personal accounts especially in this social network is easy as hacking seems to be a hobby of some online pranksters. I was surprised when I googled “friendster hacking”, and more than a million hits were found in a few seconds. I checked out one of the sites and found that people are willing to get the password of an account for free without regard as to who was asking and unsupported by any valid claim as to why they wanna gain access to the account. Even if they do posited a reason, there’s really no way of verifying if the claim was true. So one only has to ask and they shall be given.

Can the person who hacked into the account be prosecuted for Libel under Art.353 of the RPC? The elements of the felony are: defamatory imputation, malice in law or in fact, publication and an identified or identifiable victim. The elements seem to be present in this case but the problem is, since the person hacked into the complainant’s account online and changed it (which can be done at any internet shop), proof as to the identity of the perpetrator is hard to produce, especially with the need for conviction beyond reasonable doubt.

Can the person claim for damages under Art 19 & 20 of the Civil Code? This is also possible but again it would be hard to prove, as the most she has is that the person has an ill motive against her. This is not a new occurrence in our society, as more and more Filipinos get hooked online. But however prevalent it seems, there still seems to be a void on how to legally address this online invasion of privacy.