Snitching On Yourself

On more than one occasion I have written about my fascination with fast cars. I love all the precise engineering which has to go into the high-end cars as well as the idea of making high-performance cars out of things which were left to rust in someone's yard. And television has plenty of options to give me my fill on this top from two versions of "Top Gear" to shows like "Fast & Loud" or "Texas Car Wars." I like to watch all these show despite the fact that I would never be so dumb as to buy one of these cars myself. Expensive cars are the worst investment you can ever make because they lose half their value as soon as you get off the lot and there are way too many bad drivers out on the road to prevent me from ever fully enjoying driving a car like that, which is why I have look but don't touch policy. Still, doesn't mean I can't enjoy watching other people push their cars to the limits and that was why I was fascinated by a video which surfaced the other day in which a man calling himself "Afroduck" (one of these days we're going to have a nationwide debate about screen names), recorded himself driving the nearly 27 miles around the island of Manhattan in just under 25 minutes, setting a new record for the trip and breaking just about every speed limit set along the way. It was an insane piece of driving and had all the makings of your typical viral video in that it was someone trying hard to set a record which is only important to the person working the camera... oh, and also the NYPD who wanted to arrest the man for reckless driving.

Since this is the age of people willing putting unlimited personal information about themselves out there for public consumption (something which made the NSA hacking scandal from a few months about seem rather funny), it wasn't too long before the authorities figured out the true identity of Mr. Astroduck and took him into custody. It just reminded me that for as tech-savvy as we all have become, for some reason people seem to keep forgetting that when you post a public file on the internet the public is going to see it. I know most people post these videos are looking for 5 minutes of internet fame, maybe an appearance on Tosh.0, but once it is out there you can't control who sees it. That means if you post a video of yourself doing something illegal and the police eventually watch it after they are done laughing at you they will begin to do their job, which means tracking you down. It's bad enough to be arrested for a crime, but it has to be worse when the crime was committed days ago and you would have gotten away with it if you had just kept the fact you did it to yourself. We've come a long way in terms when it come to protecting anonymity on viral videos but every now and again something like this surfaces to remind us that there are still plenty of people out there who don't think things all the way through. Still, considering this particular idiot was driving around Manhattan at dangerous speeds and could have killed someone if he screwed up, I have to say I'm glad he wasn't smart enough to make his video private.