Deception and Technology

Changes in technology have made deception easier to practice and more difficult to detect. Recent developments in technology have enabled people to doctor existing images and create new fake images, and to lie and deceive using new forms of interpersonal communication, including the telephone and instant messaging. New technology has also enabled users to target large numbers of people at once, as in the practices of spamming and phishing, and cognitive hacking more generally. This new form of deception is called digital deception. However, not all new forms of technology promote deception. Some new forms of technology may in fact promote honesty and self-disclosure. Furthermore, developments in technology have also led to new ways to detect attempted deception.

Photographs are taken to capture how things actually are, or at least how they actually look. To doctor them is therefore to engage in an attempt to deceive, because the image will be assumed to be true by those who see it. However, creating fake images and doctoring images is nothing new to photography. The 1860 heroic style photographic portrait of Abraham Lincoln is a composite of two photos: the head of Lincoln and the body [Page 256]of a southern proslavery politician named John Calhoun. Between 1917 and 1920, two girls in Cottingley, Yorkshire, manufactured photographs of fairies in their garden that were actually photographs of paper fairies, fooling many. Josef Stalin had his political enemies were removed from official photographs as though they never existed.

With computer technology and software, the doctoring and forging of images has become much easier and is much more widespread. Doctoring is so prevalent that people simply expect the photographs in magazines to be airbrushed or Photoshopped to make celebrities look younger, skinnier, or prettier; to be more tanned; to have whiter teeth; or even to be better dressed. There is no apology for this practice in the magazine industry. Nevertheless, people continue to be deceived by a doctored photograph of, for example, Oprah Winfrey's head on a skinnier white woman's body. People are also deceived by composite images in magazines and tabloid newspapers that present celebrities as being in the same place at the same time, when in fact they were the same place at different times or were never in the same place at all. Finally, people are often deceived by doctored or fake photographs used in social network profiles.