Pedophiles

One thing that I hear about that absolutely sickens me is the constant fight against online pedophiles. These creeps prey on young boys and girls who legitimately have no idea what is going on. I've heard of men posing as young people and sharing pictures of "themselves" as that young person to lure their prey somewhere. Many times you hear of a "young man" offering to meet up with a young woman somewhere public and describe what he will be wearing. The problem with that is that they can make up something and the prey will actually describe what he/she is wearing and the kidnap/molestation has been set up. Another one I hear of is young people sharing revealing photos of themselves with someone of their same age while that person they're sharing with is actually a pervert. The Children's Protection Campaign has developed a website for parents to visit in order to find ways to protect their children from creeps like these. For more information please visit that site at http://www.thecpac.com/protect.html and learn what you can do to fight the pedophiles of the world.

Online Security:

Staying "safe" online is relative to each person. However, each person is some sort of posable risk every time they get online. For those of us who have been raised digital we have grown more concious of, and can identify something fishy before getting too involved in it. For others like the older generation and the youngsters coming up online the odds are swayed in the favor of the net. Between scammers, phishers, and viruses there are a ton of ways to get yourself in trouble or have your computer crashed for you. On http://www.staysafeonline.org/ there are several suggestions given to help protect yourself from all of the above mentioned threats. Some people think that a standard anti-virus software will keep you safe. On the contrary though, each anti-virus company will tell you that the cyber threat is always expanding and changing, and that they cannot always update fast enough to protect you. Though eventually most viruses to get caught there are those that will take over your computer or your life for that matter if you're exposed. Please consider the advice from this site before you download your next virus.

Online Privacy settings

After continously delving deeper into the world of online everything we usually don't consider where all of the information we put online is going, who all is seeing it, and the proper ways to keep it from the wrong hands. I recently ran across a website at http://www.eff.org/wp/effs-top-12-ways-protect-your-online-privacy , that explains 12 ways to keep your info from the bad guys. Apparently there are several ways to configure your web browser and explorer to block people from phishing your personal details. The website also gives some advice to manage your "cookies" which store temporary online files. They reccomend a software from  http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/ijb.html to do this. I think if you visit this site and seriously consider the possibilities of being corrupted weighed against the ease of protecting yourself, it will definitely change your perspective. Another way they say to protect yourself is to have more than one email address and keep one "clean". By clean they mean keep your primary email devoted to friends, family, and trusted associates. While having your clean email address, use another email address to converse with unknown business or online orders. There are several ways to protect your privacy, probably much better than what you're doing now, and in the end will probably save you some headache.

With the social networking era well under way, it is safe to say that privacy and security issues on the web are more important than ever. Today’s generation seems to know no limits as to what information they publish online about themselves. The growing community of “social networkers” needs to be wary of the kinds of things they put on the Internet because you never know who is going to see that information. The recent facebook security glitch sparked the creation of the website youropenbook.com, a site where users (with or without a facebook account) can go and see facebook users’ status updates and photos. There’s another website, spokeo.com, that allows you to type in someone’s name and find out various information on them including their current address as well as any previous ones (including a map to their house), phone number, gender, age, type of house and home value, hobbies, ethnicity, zodiac sign, political affiliation, religion, education, and occupation. As if that’s not enough you can also find out names of their immediate family members and see photos that they have posted onto various social networking sites. Websites like this compromise the privacy and security of users and expose how easily accessible information is once you’ve put it out there.  

blog probs

I've been back and forth with these blogger people for two days now. Just trying to set this thing up without an error code was painful enough, until dealing with the troubleshooting department. Ironically in dealing with this I stumbled upon my inquiry area. I wonder who gets access to the information that I/we put out every day. From logging in to bank accounts or email to verifying personal information over the phone or internet, the information must be available to the masses. This lead me to delve deeper into the local to global impact of modern identity, privacy, and safety thresholds.