Harman Patil (Editor)

Ren rou

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Ren-rou (Chinese: 人肉, pinyin: rén ròu), or ren rou sou suo (人肉搜索) means to mine certain specific information about someone or some people, usually done by a group of non-professional participants in coordinated effort with helps of modern technologies, especially the internet. This action is conducted usually without permission of the subject(s) being ren-roued.

Contents

Purpose of ren-rou

  • Gathering information about people to know more about someone.
  • Promoting hatred, by exposing individual actions or behaviors that is likely to be opposed by the public, or certain group of people.
  • Promoting assault against someone. By exposing subject's private information including home address, phone number, email, work place, to make this subject available to go after.
  • Holding people accountable to what they say online. By exposing the true identity of an online commentator, the subject (commentator) is attached to his/her voice, so he/she will become targeted and risk being punished (by public or law) if he/she has said something irresponsible (online).
  • Exposing someone's bad or illegal actions, like fraud.

    • Triggers for individuals become ren-roued

  • Online posting or commenting (usually in a forum) which stimulates the anger of its viewers very badly.
  • Evidences or traces being revealed against someone, suggest that there is potentially a great evil behind him/her, making people want to find out more.

    • Methods of conduct information mining

  • Going after IP address. Sometimes, people who comment anonymously online can leave their IP address available to public or certain group of people. IP address can be entered into some site to find out the physical location of that IP being assigned to. Therefore it can leak out more information to go after.
  • Posting existent information about a subject (being ren-roued) online, so other people who know the subject can recognize, and contribute more information about this subject.
  • Hacking. Breaking into email inboxes, hacking into subject computers, to mine more information.
  • Photo taking, voice recording, usually in covert.
  • Web coordinated tracking.
  • Use search engine to search information. For instance, the subject may have posted some resume on certain sites to be searched for.

    • pros&cons[1]

    pro:

  • It's a great way to uncover fraud or illegal actions.
  • Make people aware goods and evil (through learning why the subject is being ren-roued).
  • There is law to protect privacy issues, so subjects (being ren-roued) can still protect themselves against any illegal conduct of ren-rou that harms them.

    • con:

  • It invades people's privacy.
  • It makes people fear and nervous, even it is unnecessary.
  • There is no legal guide line on how to conduct it properly.

    • References

    Ren-rou Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA