The acceptance of the Internet as a medium into our society has been one of the fastest transitions of any form of communication, we blindly trust it as the solution to the demands of the modern man which in are meant to satisfy our immediately material gratification. What is often overlooked is that the information that we place on the Net might not be as stable as our salesmen selling Anti-virus would encourage you to believe. Our personal information can be hacked, scammed, or generally found in our everyday online interactions. We have set the path of our entire economic system to these interactions and have sold much of our material identity to the wired world that these is almost uncontrolled access granted from our technologically vulnerable society.
Caution should be exercised between letting a Internet give you the ability to communicate with more people at once, and how much information about you that is flowing in electron form. This may be the distinction between using the web as a tool, and letting it become an Achilles heel of our society.
Along the lines of identity theft we set our user names and passwords on our own computers in order for our memories not to work as hard at remembering sites with private information. In that case our own computers hold our identity cards for our private information. But exactly how secure is this information?
“A study commissioned by America Online and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA) found that 8 of 10 home personal computers lack the basic security protections needed for Web surfing, such as a firewall, anti virus software, or a spyware detector." The study also found that, "Nearly a quarter of online people in the United States have found themselves the target of the online con artists, and roughly one in five knows a friend or family member who has been duped." (1)
We feed the web with more information about our person.
And now with the opening of social networks to public search engines, there is even more access allowed for peoples to sponge private information. Facebook for example is now opening up its once secure social area for any Google search to find and use. SO if you think those wasted pictures of you in collage are safe, make sure. Your first line of defense is limiting that amount of public information floating around about you. And as we paste our photo's to the server space, the online image is becoming something to question. Through the fluidity of the web, we are seeing the manipulation of personalities.
For instance, what if some else liked your persona more than his/her own, plagiarizing your information, images, and contextualizing their space in a way that showed you, but was accessible to them? Identity theft is a huge financial problem when it comes to bank statements and social security numbers, but how do you manage a virtual life with someone attempting to steal your social identity? Going to youtube.com with a search of MY IDENTITY WAS STOLEN!! uploads all kinds of videos about people losing there identity to strangers. Since there is no World Web Police to track down profile-thiefs, the only thing left to do is to take the matter into your own hands and take action. Every action becomes harder to take against a person as they live farther away places.
Although its becomes hard for the everyday person to track and effectively trace another persons footsteps to tell them what they are doing, what they have done, and where they will be next, large corporations have been compiling data sets on everyone of us power users for years. Everything we buy goes into some company’s great database on our spending patterns. Our credit cards track us 24 hrs a day. The fluidity of plastic comes with Big Brother wanting to know if your traveling to Ottawa on an impulse drive, or if Johnny Slick Finger’s has stolen your card. Even if your the card holder, it is possible for a company to activate theft prevention on your card and cancel it in the midst of your road trip. Then, you arrive at the Canadian Inn to find out the credit card was canceled after the Beef Jerky purchase on the South Dakota boarder makes that spontaneous trip up North seems like a much colder excursion than you had planned. This just goes to show that all of us have become celebrities in the eye of the conglomeration, who track us like paparazzi after every transaction we make.
This databasing and individual celebrity status might not make all of our lives as safe as we think. The spreading fan of the Big Brother effect is connected to our ever-watchful government. Recently, their tactics of information gathering have proven to have gotten us into a war (with the wrong country), banned the dangerous peace activist, Cat Stevens, from entering the country, and have aided in the transition to safer airport security after “the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), a subsidiary agency of DHS, recently admitted to having mistakenly placed the names of 30,000 airline passengers on a watch list for potential terrorists.” (1) All that important information their storing does not mean our government is any better at understanding it.
In the process, our living becomes traceable and cataloged as information about the population is stored in that great data bank in the sky. This data-bank, called the Internet, is held on 12 main servers that support the traffic flow of the entire web. If one of these severs were to become overloaded- the entire Internet would crash. (3) This reliance on the Net, makes the western world a great target for hackers who try and gain fame by causing a the collapse of the internet, and if successful, our great Library of Alexandria II would once again come to a crashing to a fiery ball of melted hard drive.
Some governments have been accused of using this as a tactic by creating a collapse of information. Military strategists know if you can take away a countries ability to input information into their system, you eliminate their ability to fight an effective war. Therefore we are seeing political, as well as military staged attacks on sections of the net in order to make effective war strategies that much harder on governments who find themselves and the long end of a cyber-barrel.
So, to the public; protect yourself, your information and your internet access. Keep the web a free common space, and work to protect Web equality. Then we'll see who really has the power.
JJ Friedman
1. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/id_theft_fears.html
2.
http://speakout.com/activism/opinions/5394-1.html
3.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00033FF0-A329-1C75-9B81809EC588EF21&pageNumber=3&catID=4
