We’re trapped on the information spyway

Facebook scam fear Good thing Tory party emails hit my inbox marked True, Sofia. I wouldn’t open them if Sofia’s surname was False.

SPIES and terrorists used to schlep around graveyards looking for the tombstones of dead babies whose identities they could steal.

They’d then harvest the information to apply for documents needed for a dodgy passport, knowing their victim had never applied for one.

The method was revealed in Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal. But we’ve moved on apace since his 1971 book. Now spooks stay at home and sift through Facebook on their laptops instead.

I first learned of the Facebook scam to cook up fake passports from KGB defector Boris Karpichkov who had six of them.

Chump

He’d search the site for some obscure East European potato farmer whose posts showed he’d never ventured more than a couple of miles from his home.

Using the personal details Facebook routinely carries, Boris had enough for his forgery. Anyone making checks would simply find a potato farmer with a sudden yen for foreign travel.

That’s the danger with online. We happily give away personal information without thinking how those with malicious intent might use it.

And new developments mean social media stays at least ten steps ahead of official attempts to regulate it.

The allegations swirling around data firm Cambridge Analytica centre on hoovering up personal information obtained through quizzes and targeting voters with messages tailored to personality profiles.

That might have influenced the outcomes of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election and David Cameron’s Brexit referendum.

If algorithms really can skew democ- racy we might as well kick the ballot box out the window. You can protect yourself by taking care with apps, using ad blockers, or just deleting Facebook. But few of us will do those things.

There is a glimmer of hope, and it’s in the unlikely form of that chump Trump himself. Human nature may have its own self-correcting mechanism. The president has been banging on about fake news so much we have now become alert to it and suspicious of it. Crafty messaging may not work so well any more.

And just as spooks once tramped through cemeteries we’ll carry on hauling ourselves to polling stations to cast our votes with pencil and paper.

Influenced by nothing more than our judgement.