The Internet is a place in which it is imperative to remain anonymous at all times while working or just relaxing. When surfing online, you are side-by-side with many people you have never met before. Many of them are just there to do their business and leave, but some are there for other reasons. Where there is money, there are criminals. These criminals realize being online and doing theft is much easier and less risky than doing so in real-life and running the risk of being caught red-handed.

While this data should never be handed over willingly, this just recently happened. A cheerleader at a school in Mississippi was demanded to hand over her FaceBook information to her cheer-leading coach. The cheer-leading coach heard about this girl making a fuss about some internal politics of the team, and figured the information would have been conversed about on FaceBook. She was right; the girl surrendered her information and the coach found the conversation and alerted the rest of the school faculty. The girl was quickly reprimanded for her actions.

This seems wrong, and it is. The girl was forced to give up her personal information for her FaceBook account and then her account was hacked during school hours and on school property, then she was punished for her speech. This is unconstitutional, but unfortunately happens often on the Internet.

Everything today in the “Information Generation” focuses on expediting anything that can be, and automating anything that can be. Criminals these days can actually steal without being close to anyone or anything: a scary thought, but it is true. Many people have heard the story or watched the video of Chris Paget. He simply climbed in his car, and after arming himself with some easily purchasable Motorola tracking technology, he cruised around Fisherman’s Wharf, looking for victims. Soon enough, his device picked up some radio signals, and downloaded directly to his laptop the names and numbers of people’s identity cards that had been loaded with the new radio-interfacing. He was able to steal these people’s identity and information from over twenty feet away, and nobody was the wiser; beats pick pocketing for sure! His video made headlines all over the Internet, and although he didn’t use the information maliciously, and simply as a pedagogic tool, it opened people’s eyes: that could have been me!

The government asserts that these tracking technologies will speed up the entry of citizens back into the country, checks at borders, and deter interlopers from trying to get into the United States. What they propose to do is insert a tiny radio frequency chip into every citizen’s identification cards and driver’s licenses to speed up the process of identifying someone. Basically, they give the border example. Instead of pulling up to a border, rummaging around for your pass and having an official scan it, and ask you twenty questions, you do absolutely nothing. That’s right; you don’t even have to pull your card out. As long as it is in your car or up to a twenty feet radius, the person will simply press a button to remotely scan it, and you will be on your way.

This all sounds great, and it really is intuitive and breakthrough technology. It would be a bit hedonistic to believe that it is all good however; there are two sides to every coin. The downside of this technology is that is possibly makes you traceable. As Chris showed the world with his criminal documentary, these cards could be scanned by a non-government official for a bad purpose, and your identity would be stolen. You wouldn’t even realize it until much later either! If your passport is stolen now, you would know because you wouldn’t be able to find it. If this new technology is ratified and employed, the consequences could be dire. You could be holding your passport or I.D., but it could actually be already stolen. A strange concept to grasp, but altogether unsettling.

Although the Internet has many uses these days, the most popular use of it has to be for online shopping. It seems that Ebay may have started the craze, but these online vendors have blown up since its advent. Amazon, Craigslist; they all are successful sites and are probably the most highly populated sites on the Internet today.

Although these places say they are all about the customer, one cannot sometimes always be fooled so. Many of these companies are coming out of the woodwork and coming into scandals regarding the privacy of their loyal consumer’s data.

When you sign up for these stores services and go to buy something, you are prompted to enter all sorts of data. At the time, it all seems to be for the good of expedited shipping, and other company related things. Even a credit card number is required, so that the seller may have access to his or her money.

Everybody is familiar with the stories of people getting swindled by false companies, or being tricked by an unreliable seller. This is not a big concern on the big selling sites, but there is another thing that is. They sell your private information to third party companies who then in turn try to sell you even more things.

You may have heard privacy sites use the term “cloud computing” and speak of it as a privacy issue. If you aren’t privy to the vernacular of Internet users, cloud computing refers to storing information virtually on the Internet, instead of on private, physical servers. There are a couple of tangible advantages to this; for one, you don’t have to take up such a massive amount of space for huge computer servers. Then, it is cheaper. The Internet has unlimited storage space, and is often very cheap or free to put all of your information there. Lastly, it isn’t the company’s responsibility to store, look after, and keep safe the information of its clientele. While this all sounds good, you know the old saying: there’s two sides to every coin.

This universal adoption of cloud computing among many different companies represents a serious privacy concern. First of all, these companies are no longer the ones protecting the information. When the data is stored on their own physical, private computer network, it would be significantly harder for a hacker to break in and steal all sorts of sensitive information. These things almost never happened.

We live in an age of many concerns and fears. Children aren’t allowed to play outside anymore as they were ten years ago for fear of being stolen by some interloper patrolling the neighborhood. People are now given intensive scans at the airport for everything from knives, to drugs, to guns. Even your loved ones waiting to greet you are not allowed to come up to the terminals anymore, instead having to wait outside in the crowded lobbies and baggage claims. The Internet has also changed. Once there was only a few sites to go on, and nobody knew a thing about spy ware or malware. People sent e-mails and went on sites in a totally blissful and carefree manner, but that soon changed.

With the advent of the “Information Generation”, people flocked to the Internet for its unlimited resources and its great exploring potential. People began to have virtual lives online, living vicariously through games or social networking sites. The Internet unknowingly conglomerated with television through YouTube, and is currently putting television on its last legs. Even the drudging commute to work is becoming archaic, and being replaced by the coffee-fueled masses that earn their bread working from home.

America has always been a land of change, as well as freedom. Right now, we are in the middle of another Industrial Revolution; although perhaps it will appear in history textbooks as the Technology Revolution. As the people evolved and changed their habits, so did the inventive criminals. Crime has always been a plaguing leech on America’s side, but one that is inevitable by the amount of freedom each citizen enjoys. Although criminals are often stereotypically portrayed as completely ignorant, uneducated low lives, they know quite some about their art; it is their chosen profession. They follow people and find out where they are most unprotected and will strike there when the opportunity arises. They also factor in how likely it is that they will be caught.

When everyone began using the Internet, criminals began to see that this was an excellent new avenue for them to exploit. Instead of having to rob someone in a suspicious back alley or on a crowded subway train, they could do so surreptitiously online, without even a trace of fear. A robber mugging someone in an alley will be plagued by the screams of his victim, and most likely caught by police as he tries to escape. An Internet hacker who hacks into an innocent person’s bank account online will not have to worry about the victim screaming for help, nor about a quick escape. It is likely the victim won’t even know that they have been robbed until months later, and by then the criminals will be gone, without a shred of evidence left behind.

In the old days, before the dawning of the “Information Age”, when criminals would commit a crime, they would be fugitives on the run for a long time; laying low. They would re-emerge after hiding out for a number of years and slowly re-make their empire. The times have changed, and so have the criminals. Criminals now brazenly go directly to court to change their names and escape police records.

When police bring someone in, obviously they remember a face, but after it has been a long time they simply look someone’s name up to see who’s who. A violent gang member who was arrested by police recently changed his name to Tony Soprano, after the popular Sopranos television show character. The police did not know him as Tony Soprano though. After his name change, if the police were to pull him over and run his license, they would have no record of “Tony Soprano” a being violent criminal. When they run someone’s license, if the person comes back as a past felon, they will approach with caution. Tony Soprano had no record though, and they probably just laughed about the irony of his name being the same as a murderous television show character’s. Little do they know he likely is armed.

This site is a god-send for a culture full of fanatical social networking fans, but not many security buffs. Everybody these days has a MySpace, FaceBook, or some other form of Internet profile. Through these, friends stay in touch, people meet new people, and even businesses are run! While this all sounds good and dandy, it would be naïve and idyllic to believe that these sites only bring good things to the table. After losing our hedonistic outlooks, the fact of the matter these communication websites can be dangerous if not used correctly, and it’s scary how many people don’t use them correctly.

Enter ConnectSafely.com. This site is full of information. news, and guides to educate, inform, and help to protect social networking users online. Upon first entry, you’ll see that the site is quite aesthetically pleasing. A soft white background provides a perfect backdrop for nativity scenes of the information generation, skateboarders with iPods, kids using video cameras, and especially the woman on the computer. A quick viewing of the “About Us” page shows that the site is totally non-profit, and its sole aim is to propagate safety knowledge and make young people and adults more aware and cognizant of their roles online and how to become more safe.

Illegal immigration is a big problem in the U.S. today and is growing worse by the day. American citizens are losing jobs everyday to their illegal counterparts who will work for much less than they will. While minimum wage is what the lowest income Americans live with, for people of less developed countries, this money is unlike anything they have ever seen  before. Think about it from an employer’s perspective; you have two workers, and one will work for less money; who do you pick? The answer is obvious, as money is everyone’s number one concern.

The public has remained quiet about this problem for some time, but the downturn in the economy has made getting a job and holding one much more difficult. The U.S. is discussing the implementation of biometric cards to verify that all employees are legitimate citizens. They propose to use iris scans or maybe fingerprint scans that would require every employee to sign in at the beginning of every day and especially for job interviews.

The plan also proposes to step up immigration security and make it more difficult for someone to infiltrate the U.S.’s borders. For workers who are illegal but have been in the U.S. for some time, they will offer naturalization processes that are normally only available to legitimate immigrants.

The city of Los Angeles has proposed a multi-million dollar buyout of all sorts of Internet information: e-mail, personal information, even police records. They propose to use Google to find all of this information; essentially tap Google’s unlimited database. Although the city wishes to buy everything for noble reasons like criminal tracking and other crime deterrents, the public worries for its loss of privacy.

Paul Weber, who spearheads the Los Angeles Police Protective League, says that he himself is worried. He says that his unit has little knowledge on what the plan fully entails, and they are quite worried about what the repercussions on the public’s privacy will be. He is especially worried about the release of confidential police records and other criminal data.

He was right, and not the only one worried. The online messaging giant Twitter sent out a message to be careful when using Google, because they frequently use “cloud computing”: storing files online rather than in their direct control. This allows the data to be much easier to hack and get into. Twitter isn’t the only one to have this concern though, but it a novel event that one huge company calls out another.

This shift from keeping data and information online is useful, as it cleans up the massive amount of space needed to store all of this data, but it represents many security issues. For one, the whole thing would be accessed by a username and password system, so if a hacker got either, he could be on his way into a gold mine of information. This is also amplified by the fact that many people link their accounts together, so if a hacker gained access to one account, he could actually be getting into many accounts. Also, there are not as many layers of security that prevent an interloper from gaining access.

This day and age isn’t called the “Information Generation” for no reason. Nearly every worker does all of their work online and over the computer, and the number of people working from home on the computer has grown to number that could never even be comprehended ten years ago. It has even trickled down to kids. What kid doesn’t have a computer in the house or own one personally. Many schools have begun to do classes and class work online as well. Everything is going digital, but there are problems as well.

The Internet is a great way to just have fun exploring. Doing a Google search about something you are interested in is a great way to pass the time and become more educated. The Internet is also very distracting. Anyone can contest to the devil vs. angel they feel every day while at work; they want to work, but the Internet is so alluring. Some can compromise, and just use it on specific, time allotted breaks, but others will spend all day on YouTube or fantasy football and get absolutely nothing done, and probably an angry call from the boss later for lack of productivity. For this reason, many employers and schools limit and censor the Internet. A hired worker is one thing, but a student in a boring class they hate will have no problem blocking out the droning teacher and wasting an hour away.