A nitwit on Orkut. There are many, you say?

While doing my routine channel changes, I caught a news clip on a news channel (I forget which one it was). Orkut was the object of attention and with the amount of firing hurled at Orkut, I thought my television set will go up in flames.

The gist of the story: A girl met a boy on Orkut and they became paly-paly after some time (I refuse to use the sentence 'She was befriended by him', that's utter nonsense, he can't be friends with her if she doesn't want to). She shared her personal details, including photographs of her family, her phone number, her address etc. After a while, there was a tiff among them and the boy went ahead and 'published' all her details on Orkut. The girl claims that the boy put her name and phone number on his scrapbook for everyone to see.

The news channel invited the Managing Director of Google India and what surprises me is that the MD agreed to it! If a girl is stupid enough to give out her phone number to strangers, what can the MD of Google India can do about that? If she didn't know that the rules of real life applied pretty much the same way to the internet life, whose fault is it? How can she claim that Orkut was responsible for the mess when she didn't her own boundaries? How can she ask the MD to make scrapbooks private? If scrapbooks are private, then how do they differ from emails?

I am not pro-Orkut or anything, I know there are many pitfalls in using Orkut which many people don't know. (Read my older posts on about Orkut to know my opinion.) All I am saying is, don't point a finger at Orkut to justify your stupidity. If you are a nitwit, abstain from using Orkut.

PS: I really wonder how net-savvy this particular news channel is. For the above story, the headlines being shown was: 'Orkut hacked'. This news channel should have 'How computers work' and 'How internet works' on their wish list.