SCM501 - Online Safety and Privacy - JRE Top Picks

Topic Discussion

Concerning the topic of online safety and privacy it often has people with quite polarizing opinions, some people are overly concerned with their privacy to the point where they are paranoid whereas some people live in blissful ignorance of what's really going on.

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle and most people are already being taken advantage of in ways that some do not realize. Big tech companies farm information on people and re-purpose said information without peoples consent and/or awareness. So in this day and age we have huge tech companies blowing up over this massively profitable endeavor, these companies were afforded trust from the public because in the early days of tech everything these companies did simply made things better but now they are in a position where they likely have to be reigned in by the government. Government intervention may include splitting the companies up into smaller decentralized companies and/or enforcing a rule in which they can't use anyone's information for profit against their will.

I don't necessarily think people need to refrain from using social media account but we need to look at putting in laws like I mentioned before.

Many companies suffer data breaches these days, often leaking millions of people data to those who would sell it on to many others. It's ever increasingly import to have secure passwords across your digital presence in order to maintain a resilient stance when navigating the online landscape.

There is safety in numbers, most of us are just another zebra among a gigantic pack of zebras, it's unlikely that a lion will pick us out but I believe if you find yourself in a position where you may be a target for people then you need to ensure that you are not easily taken advantage from both social engineering standpoints & traditional hacking.

Block chain has potential to give us a more secure internet via the use of decentralized transactions, today if your bank is compromised then you could potentially lose your money, block chain leverages a decentralized model instead.

What do I do to protect myself?

Having grown up spending most of my time on the internet I have a pretty well developed intuition when it comes to online safety. This makes me quite a hard target and I believe I'm part of a demographic that most people will not waste time with anyway.

I use a password manager (lastpass) to handle all my passwords, I have logins to something around 40+ different websites, managing this without using the same password across many of them would be quite a chore but lastpass does a pretty good job in that it allows me to use extremely secure passwords that I don't have to remember. They are all stored behind lastpass login which is an extremely strong password that would require some extreme social engineering for anyone to find out.

With different passwords for every website and those passwords being extremely hard to crack I run a very low risk of having any of my accounts compromised which I think is the most important thing when it comes to online safety. 

Concerning privacy I simply just don't put anything out there that I don't want people to know. If I upload a picture I'm aware that anyone could possibly see it one way or another including future employers. Awareness is the key here I think, people need to be mindful of what they post in public forums.