Jishan's Log 16: Opinion on Digital Security

 

Digital Security

The 21st Century. An era filled with the inception of world-changing innovations and the creation of technology whose sciences were just a fiction for movies in the 80’s and 90’s. More and more we are abandoning our native ways of doing a simple task and simplifying it through the use of modern technology. The individual cellphone replacing the family telephone, e-mails replacing the personal feel of letters and so on. As we incorporate these inventions more and more into our lives and into our world, we are also welcoming the dangers that are, well, ‘already made’ when those technologies were invented. We are already trusting these technologies with our personal (sometimes even too personal) information about us and we are already seeing big corporations abuse these kinds of privileges that we ourselves, by our own decisions and by our own hands, freely give it to them with the assumption that they can keep it safe and use that data to help us more in our daily lives. Therefore, a huge concern has raised that whether our Digital Security in the modern world is all-time compromised or not and whether, with the introduction of hackers, raises the bigger question that: are we totally safe or not?

Digital Security has been, throughout the 21st century, the most important and most debated topic. It was also very reasonable as to why it was so, as Digital Security is something that is not to be taken lightly. Nowadays all of us share our personal stories, data, photos and so on, to the digital platforms known as ‘Clouds’. Furthermore, not only Clouds, but websites even store our sessions, more commonly know as cookies, which basically gives them the permission to record what we clicked on or how we interacted in the website or not. Even though cookies are really useful for tracking back from where we previously left off, a concern arises that some websites may abuse this type of privilege and sell our information to advertising firms in exchange for monetary purposes. Big corporations, however, are not our only problem. In this vast list of threats to Digital Security, we have hackers, who compromise your data and hold it for themselves as a ransom technique. We have seen many stories of people whose very sensitive personal information was leaked online by this society.

Another form of threat, which is actually the most popular one and also the most seen-and-ignored one, is online harassment. Online harassment is growing day by day, whether it be a simple person who is different and bullied at school, to even the biggest celebrity for indulging in an act that their fans didn’t love. We have seen many celebrities vanish from all kinds of social media due to fierce level of harassment from people. We have also seen people take their very own live because of this online plague. Even though schools and communities seem to promote activities to “Stop Cyberbullying”, however it just doesn’t seem to work as majority of the people seek personal gain from online harassment rather than actually caring for the mental health of their victims.

Whilst browsing online or using any digital services, we leave behind a trail of data which is termed “Digital Footprint”. Just like a trail, a digital footprint (left by anyone) can be followed right to the destination of its source. Digital Footprint is a very risky business as it can be used effectively for online harassment and identity theft (a person/account interacting as someone they are not in attempts to spread viruses online or catfish people). To put this into a practical example, imagine you are in a forest, and its full of wild animals ready to harm you anytime they set their eyes on you. You are walking through the forest (a digital network) and a tiger (your online attacker) is closely following you by tracking those digital footprints and even if possible, would actually use them to predict where you will be going next.

Digital Security is not only compromised by Digital Footprint or the abuse of data by big corporations, but also by unregulated platforms and groups in social media. A famous example of this is a platform like Reddit. Reddit is a place where people come to share ideas and knowledge as well as help each other. However, the dark side of Reddit is that there are sections (mainly called subreddits), where the users tend to engage more into cyberbullying. There are also groups in Facebook which is specifically opened just to exert the dislike of a person to cyberbully them. We’ve all heard the story of Lady Gaga’s online harassment, how her classmates back in the day specifically created a group in her name where they used to exert their dislike about her.

There are so many problems regarding Digital Security. We’ve discussed the problems only till now, let’s touch the solutions.

In order to ensure maximum safety, we need to try to reduce as much Digital Footprint as possible. In order to make this feat possible, we must seek out alternatives which ensure maximum security to our privacy. Though most companies claim that the information from their devices or their software services are double sided encrypted (which means not even they can access your information), yet we must not only be dependent on these promises. Nowadays, there are services that ensure your digital safety and security.

Firstly, it is important to keep your devices as secured as possible. The first step to solving Digital Security vulnerabilities is to ensure protection with the device you are using to access the World Wide Web. We can ensure this by using anti-virus software in our devices and also follow their recommendations, including running a full malware scan through our devices. It is also a common feature for these kinds of software that whilst making online payments through online for products in e-commerce sites, these open a separate browser that is very well protected by them.

Secondly, we now need to secure ourselves while browsing through the World Wide Web. There is a very interesting search engine, which is termed as “Googles’ privacy alternative”, called DuckDuckGo. What makes it unique is that it erases any kind of digital footprint that you leave behind while searching for a topic, including having its own in-built video player to prevent digital footprints left behind on YouTube. DuckDuckGo is becoming popular day by day among the youth because of its strong privacy policy, no-tracking system, and reliable search results. DuckDuckGo is the perfect choice if you want to browse around the internet securely without a worry that your information is being collected and will be then used to advertise products using that information.

Other than search engines, the web browser matters just as much as browsing online safely and the browser that is becoming the talk of the town is Brave. Unlike Chrome, Brave doesn’t let other third parties to track your activities on the World Wide Web. However, as we browse the web, we would also like to make sure that our data is collected for our well being as well. Brave gives you the full freedom to make the choice whether you want to leave a digital footprint behind the internet or not.

In the modern times, most people interact through apps, that can reduce the hassle of using a search engine, searching about the website or webpage they want to visit. An app simplifies that. In order to make sure that it would work fine, it requires permission to access some services of your smartphone. These are used to make sure that the app works collectively well. In such cases, most apps use this technique to collect data from you. Notoriously, one such app is called WhatsApp and it is already in the center of Digital Security concerns. Users are now switching to Telegram or Signal, a secure alternative to chat apps.

Even though privacy matters, and companies do collect our data and show adverts related to it, the light of this side is that it may also at times help us gravely. In the case of people with health problems, they would use that data and help them plan their day and show the products that has a possibility of helping them. Apple is famously doing that as we speak. Sometimes, for the betterment of use, we do need to share our data with them as they would then come up with features that could help the masses with various health problems. Not only that, personal preferences such as food, music, movies, tv sitcoms, and so on would also be better if collected as there are a lot of collections of similar tastes of hobbies on the internet and we rarely have the time to go digging for those contents. Rather, these companies could use our personal preferences and show us what other activities or tv sitcoms match with our tastes and why this would be a fine piece of entertainment for us.

Digital Security is like a coin. As harmful as it seems to us, it is also beneficial to monitor us about what we like to do and how are we feeling today. It is an impossible feat to help stop the collection of our data by companies, and also impossible to stop online harassment as most of it may come from peers that have access to our information. It is our sole responsibility, and ours alone, to make sure whether we are being safe enough on the internet or not.

What are your thoughts about Digital Security? Please leave your opinions in the comments.