It can be easily asserted that everyone has visited a mall at some point in their lives. It is quite a place; tons of stores right next to each other, competing for lower prices and all within walking distance. There are also a multitude of stores to choose from; clothes are in abundance and are tools of the trade for malls of all sorts, but there are also house based stores, electronic equipment, music equipment, and even the odd gag gift store. These malls are often air conditioned quite nicely, but during the scorching summer months or the frigid winter months, can be to one extreme or the other. Also, the usefulness and competitive prices these malls offer bring in throngs of people, and one can often have trouble traversing from store to store, let alone accessing the crowded rest areas and trying to find a seat. As refuge from these malls, but with the convenience, price, and selection they offer, online shopping was born. Your wallet protects all of your data from being stolen.

Online shopping is a novel concept. Instead of actually carrying all of your groceries, clothes, or other miscellanea around with you, you simply add them to your shopping cart. The prices are still low, but you can shop from the convenience of your home and without the open and close hours that sporadic malls have. Also, you don’t have to carry all of your bags when you are shopping and worry about keeping track of receipts and all of that small stuff.

For years now we’ve warned people about the need fro privacy and how lack of privacy can lead to identity theft.  Many people think it can’t happen to them.  This You Tube video shows otherwise.  One expert hacker stole 130,000,000 credit card numbers.  Was one of them yours?

One of the issues raised in the video is the use of debit cards.  Again, for years we’ve been telling people not to use debit cards.  They do not offer the same protections that credit cards do.

However, the main item to take away from this, is that protecting your identity, and your privacy, is up to you.  You need to be proactive.  Think through the issues and put safeguards in place so that you do not wind up as a victim.

When shopping online, there are many security risks to consider. While nobody is going to be stealing your purse or wallet like might happen in an actual crowded mall, you run many other risks a person in real life doesn’t have to. For example, by leaving your connection open and not making it go through some kind of encryption software or any sort of privacy software or program, a hacker could easily break in to your transaction and see what you have bought, are going to buy, or even deleted or put off of your shopping cart. Also, they could even more maliciously hack into your transaction or your account and steal your identity and credit card numbers and passwords. Many identity thefts happen on sites like these; shopping sites. The user is not protected by any sort of Internet software, and the hacker can easily break in with minimal difficulty.

The United States have always been wary of terrorism and other threats to our national security. Other countries seem to despise us, whether it be for differences in religion or ethics, difference in cultures, or simply a strong envy of our opulence. While America has always been very conscious of our security, the 911 attacks showed us that our defenses were not infallible, and there is always a chance for disaster to strike. This woke us up so to speak, and in today’s day and age, security for our nation is top priority of the government.

You have seen the changes all around you, and they were often blatant. The medium that allowed the attacks, air travel, has been most affected by that fateful day. Many people remember before the attacks when they could go and meet their loved ones in the terminal to greet them, while now they must wait outside. Many people remember zipping through the security lines, while now you are in there forever being searched and prodded. Everyone has heard the news of the airports possibly putting in full body scanners to scan passengers even more thoroughly, and to avoid even more accidents from filtering through.

Video surveillance is utilized by many people in the United States today. Regular people use them to keep a watchful eye over their property; if they leave for work or go on an extended vacation they will flip it on to get evidence of any attempted break ins. The police are the main proprietors of these security cameras though, as they use them in pretty much everything they do; they are mounted to the front of every police car and kept rolling all of the time so the crook (or the cop!) can’t get away with any funny business. Businesses also employ these cameras services quite regularly. They might do so for security reasons, such as mounting one outside of their office building to try and catch any crooks on video who might be breaking into their building. They could also do it for a more controversial reason; watching the employees. Many businesses use these cameras to monitor unknowing employees, and make sure they aren’t doing anything illicit.

There are two sides to this argument; one says yes to the cameras, and one says no. The side supporting the video surveillance says that the threat of cameras watching employees will stop them from doing anything the company would not support. Also, it takes out the risk of trusting an employee with too sensitive of a task. The other side says that this trust is exactly what makes an employee loyal; if they are being watched all of the time, they won’t feel trustworthy themselves. Also, it just isn’t right to perform monitoring of someone without them knowing, and you know the employees wouldn’t know.

Internet piracy; although it has nothing to do with the swashbuckling scallywags that ride around on big ships and steal and plunder from innocents, the concepts are similar. Online piracy deals with a bunch of different things, be it music, games, movies, documents, or any other online media strata. These pirates, who are often just kids sitting in their rooms downloading music for free, are actually doing more than damage than they know for everyone.

The biggest detriment these pirates do to the world is the hurting of the economy. First of all, the music industry is hit the hardest. These kids and their stealing of the songs means no money for the bands, and without this money, the bands have no motivation or any means to make any new songs. There was a time was CD and record sales were through the roof, and since then, online sales have skyrocketed. Now though, neither is doing well because people are just sharing the music for free on peer to peer networks instead of legally going out and buying it.

Information used to be stored in a manner that was easy to manage. They would have these giant computers that were large enough to hold terabytes of information (that is a lot!) that ranged from internal controls to customer’s profiles and user preferences. These servers  were encrypted and made secure by the companies that ran them. They were also password secured and this way only authorized employees could access the data if they needed to.  When they searched for easier network management, the answer was right in front of them: the Internet. With unlimited sconnectivity and always done at cheap prices, it represented a win-win for these companies.

By storing information on the Internet, it made their consumer’s data vulnerable.  The problem is, these monolithic computers were safe and secure, while the Internet wasn’t nearly as secure. The Internet can be easily hacked into, while these massive computers and their networks had so many privacy and safety safeguards that the N.S.A. would have had trouble trying to break in. The fact is though, the consumer’s lost this battle. While it helped out the big shot companies by removing their burden of network management, it hurt the consumers by having their security decreased by a large amount, and put their information at risk. “Cloud Computing” is the term put to this in discrepant practice of putting all information on the web rather than the large personal databases.

The Internet has firmly taken root in America and now is involved and vital in every aspect of life. For the first time ever, there is a medium at which organizations can build a career base and reach their clientele at minimum cost. People can connect over chatting, whether it be text or actually web cam directed, and interact and have fun online. People’s social lives now exist predominately on the Internet, though MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, etc. The Internet isn’t all good however, and this is easily recognizable. It is safe to say though the biggest wound it has inflicted is the one on people’s individual privacy.

People post to much stuff on the Internet, and it never deletes itself. Although sites rarely ever clean out their servers, even if they did, you can guarantee your information is already posted to another site. And you can be sure from there that somebody stored it on their computer and emailed it to a bunch of their friends and co-workers; a vicious cycle. Suddenly your embarrassing photo or online rant about something has made you the laughing stock of your community and future employers will hold this over your head. Employers now often do a quick Google search of their applicant’s names, to see if they have a social networking site account. Colleges do this also; they want to make sure they are hiring some complete slacker who has all sorts of incriminating stuff on his page.

No, not the sugary sweet ones. These cookies are much less succulent, and can sometimes be dangerous, and not just for your diet plan. These online cookies are just little pieces of data that a website puts on your computer when you log on. Inside the cookies are strands of information that record various things that you did on the Internet, like what parts of the site you went on, how long you stayed there, and other things about your browsing habits. This information is supposed to be helpful and for the most part it is. It serves to tell the website that it is you signing on, and though this they can bring you back to the parts of the site you liked, or even automatically load all of your user preferences that you had stored. This allowed for a more stream-lined browsing of the site, and also it allows for a site to be loaded faster.

As was mentioned before though, cookies can also be dangerous. Instead of the helpful cookies mentioned above, you can possibly have malicious cookies. These are cookies installed on your computer either by a hacker or a bad website. Through this, they can hack into your folders and steal your passwords, or simply try and track you back to your real-life location. Even worse, these cookies could contain viruses that are planted directly on to your hard drive, and your virus scanner might not even recognize it. These can either be installed to try and steal identifying data about you, or simply with malicious intent to crash your system.

People are getting on to these social networking sites more and more as more people join. Maybe it is a just a “jump on the band wagon” type of thing, but never the less, these sites grow exponentially every day. As the sites grow, and people continuously ignore privacy settings and other safety precautions on these high risk sites, more and more personal and sensitive information is posted to the World Wide Web. This information can be used for just knowledge purposes, but it can also be used maliciously.

These issues are highly unpublicized and for the most part, only privacy advocates are concerned with the matters. Most people are blissfully unaware of the privacy risk their social networking web page presents to them and everyone they involve on it. Some people are going to try and teach the youth (and truly everyone) how to properly protect themselves on the Internet and these sites.

Enter the developer called Six to Start. Partnered with a local news station they are developing a game designed to teach kids about privacy, without the “teaching” aspect seeming so austere. The game is called “Smokescreen” and kids will be able to use their privacy as a defense system; the more things and information you put out there, the less your defense will be. The game rewards them also for not completely shutting off their release of information. Sensible things to put on your blog page, like name and interests, and maybe just COUNTRY of location.