Living (your whole) Life on the Internet Discuss: Personal security and health i

Question

Living (your whole) Life on the Internet

Discuss: Personal security and health issues related to online living – addictions, bullying, vigilantism, personal health records online, identity theft, etc.

Discuss: The policy implications of cloud computing

There are countless issues with online living and the true question is what issues are there that don't exist in real life. For instance bullying exists both online and offline with the major problem being that the bullying can happen at any time online while in real life it will only happen when you are out and about. While it may be controversial I don’t consider these problems with the internet. Instead in my opinion these are issues with society that are now occurring on the internet as a new medium. However, to answer the question the health issues are the same as anything else that can be abused. People have been known to commit suicide from bullying both online and on the internet, they suffer from withdraw when removed from anything they are addicted to, and their records can be stolen anywhere. However, with the internet this can happen at any time and it never stops. As a result these problems might be magnified because it is so much harder to get away from the internet.

I have not had a Facebook for six years so I don't know from personal experience what it is like today. However, in my opinion Facebook can increase the feeling of loneliness because you see everyone else enjoying life while you spend all of your time on the computer watching others. However, the opposite can be true as well where someone suffering from loneliness can reconnect with long lost friends and obtain the social needs. To put this into perspective one of the major concerns when text messaging became popular was that we no longer hear others voices. As a result we are more disconnected from our friends and the fear was that people will not longer connect with others the same. However, this proved to be false because the ability to send texts enabled us to be social when we might not be near anyone that we could talk to.

Cloud computing has been an interesting development because it is now possible to outsource our computing needs to the cloud. As a result every company doesn't need to buy and manage a server farm greatly lowering the cost of computing. Although, the technology means that large amounts of data must be accessible to the third company and they can't always be trusted. This also means that hackers don't need to target the company. It might be more profitable to target the computing providers and steal the data from all companies that buy the services rather than attack the individual companies. This means that policies need to control what sort of data can be sent to the cloud as well as the security level of the companies you are sending the data to. If the companies are only being used to processing publicly available data for big data analysis then the policy could be lax. However, if using the cloud to handle processing for an online market place then policies should be in place to control what companies can be used for the cloud.

Explanation / Answer

Discuss: Personal security and health issues related to online living – addictions, bullying, vigilantism, personal health records online, identity theft, etc.
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In early days of twitter, it was a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." Voiceless people suddenly realized that they had a voice and it was powerful and eloquent. Social media shaming grew up to become a public weapon. This is like the democratization of justice. Hierarchies were being levelled out. Anyone can destroy someone else and not feel bad about it. There has been many cases where the internet, specifically the social media took control of people's life and dismantled it piece by piece.

In this digital age, the access to information is a powerful tool. The open internet has brought up new challenges to personal security. It has become hard to track down illegal activities and to bring such activities under jurisdiction. Lives of people are being shattered everyday by the exaggerated response of others and the cruel efforts of some to leak private information. Small actions by many people are leading to big effects. What's most disturbing is that the people involved are not trolls, but nice people like us. We tend to get satisfaction from social media approval.

Security has become a myth when it comes to personal storage as reports of accounts being hacked are surfacing more frequently. Major internet firms are facing these challenges to stop the flow of private information outside.

Internet overuse can lead to sedentary lifestyles, weight gain and a decline in physical fitness. Other symptoms can include carpal tunnel syndrome, dry eyes, migraine headaches, a decline in personal hygiene and back aches, according to Maressa Hecht, founder of Computer Addiction Services and a member of the Harvard Medical School. Split personality regarding the real life and the artificial (social) life is on rise and the concept of happiness has shifted from personal satisfaction to social approval.

Cyberbullying has negative effects on victims, such as lowering self-esteem, increasing depression and producing feelings of powerlessness (Anderson, Bresnahan, & Musatics, 2014).

Celebrities are major targets of the bullies when their actions, private information goes viral. Their accounts get hacked and hence the public shaming may tend to destruction of their career.

The internet makes us mere IP addresses or text addresses, which are exploited extensively to conduct crimes on a major scale. This is the major reason of child pornography being shared over the dark internet. Bank and credit card numbers, passports, names, addresses, driver licence details, logon details for other services are vulnerable to the theft attacks and no security measure is 100% fool proof.

:- The cloud computing is a rapidly involving concept in the 21st century and it brings a plethora of advantages, the biggest one being the data accessibility from any part of the world. Not only does it increases work efficiency but also reduces costs of operations in the longer run. The second biggest advantage of having a cloud storage is the benefit of having remote data backups as per our own convenience and hence it reduces the costs to setup the disaster recovery and backup units.

The disadvantages to cloud storage are very few, but the biggest one being the increased usage of bandwidth to access the data that increases the costs of operations a bit. Secondly, if your internet connection is not having a great speed , you might not be able to access the data. As discussed in the question, the fact of your data being online and completely out of reach when you don't have internet makes it scary. Your personal information then get relied upon your human pshychological values of trusting the data firms with your data. There are so much data being generated nowadays that we cant manage it and quite often we tend to pay less attention to the security of highly sensitive data. Hence the hackers or data miners get easy access to our data through the security loophole we ourself create. The government and data thefts are constantly trying to get a backdoor access to our data and in such a condition all we can do is to keep out most sensitive data to ourselves.

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