Ok, let's talk about your privacy on the internet...your name for example. For true safety and privacy on the WWW, it is up to us...yes up to ourselves to protect ourselves. We must be wary of everything, everyone, every site. We can never be sure what is safe and what isn't...the little padlock at the bottom of the screen still makes me worry. To be sure, learn from your friends and colleagues. When you hear of a scam or privacy issue, be wary. Have you received any e-mails lately that are totally from left field? From businesses that you have not used, for products you definitely don't want? When you do take the big step and do business on line, don't volunteer information and for heaven's sake, don't give them additional contact information. Our tech guru at school told us to clear the "cookies" after ordering anything on line to prevent any tracking. Little did I know that the site used cookies to gain access to users’ Web browsing activity. Every time I visit a site that has advertising partners, it's possible for the site to share that data with those partners. In other words, the site can give third-parties my information....my good credit information.
Did you know the top three "passwords" are 12345 and 123456 and 1234567890? How creative!
Did you know that the following names and passwords are used by over 20% of the population -
Your name
Your pet's name
The city you live in
"God"
"Letmein"
Money
Love
Now really..if you are worried about privacy you would use your name? Are you blushing out there yet?
Did you know that 1 in 5 people use the word "password" for their banking?...Again...so creative!
Did you know that it takes only 2 hours to "crack" an 8 letter password? By adding a symbol and one upper case letter can extend the time to crack a code to years.
So back to digital citizenship....we have to beware of ourselves...if we use such obvious passwords, let's just open up our bank accounts to make the theft easier!
3 comments:
What a great cartoon and post! The password thing is interesting because there is a lot of ways that hackers can use to get your password: keylogging, brute force, etc. My husband, an IT Security guy, suggests that key phrases are wise to use and have a rotation of them frequently.
Love the cartoon post, very entertaining, but a very true post. And people also use the same password for nearly everything they use online. (banking, social sites, e-mail, work, etc) I need to change my passwords more often, but then I would have to write them down. It would be much easier if there wouldn't be hackers, but hackers create jobs for IT security people.
I am an avid online shopper and I have never heard that the cookies should be cleared after an online purchase. Thanks for the information.
By the way, thanks for sharing the cute cartoon. You are right; anyone can be on the other side of the computer. We have to use common sense when on the Internet.
Posted by Ande Gibbs
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