Trusting the internet
I’ve always been hesitant to input my personal information on the internet, even for the big name companies like Facebook and Google. If I recall correctly, the deeply rooted fear of my information being leaked to the public and someone tracking me down to hurt me was instilled in me by the teacher who taught my “computer class” back in 7th grade. She was big on the whole “Stranger Danger” thing and constantly told us to never talk to people we don’t know and never release our personal information on the internet, or bad things can happen. I remember sometimes I would keep Googling myself to make sure I couldn’t be found.
Ever since then anything I did on the internet was under the guise of fake names, emails, and addresses and this made me feel safe. No one out there could determine who I was or where I lived. Unfortunately over the years I became wary of using falsified information because as the social media world propelled forwards, it began to become an inevitable fact that I would need to place my real name on the internet.
The first time I introduced myself to the world via the internet was by creating my Facebook account. I mean come on, it would be embarrassing to tell someone to add me on Facebook followed by “by the way, search for Joe Shmoe, don’t ask me why I didn’t use my real name.” Facebook is a powerful tool that now I use for both personal and school usage which is really only possible if I have my name on it. Otherwise I become that poor soul who took an exam and forgot his/her name and received no credit. After Facebook came everything else joined in on the party: new emails, twitter, tumblr, etc. The list just doesn’t end.
But aside from social media I can’t help but think about the whole push toward being “Googleable”. I’ve been told many times that before I start applying for jobs I need to have a Linked In profile and my contact information should all be easily and readily available for potential employers (and creeps). This goes against everything I was taught as a kid, and it’s just a harsh truth of how the world changes.
To make matters worse, it’s not just identifier information anymore. It’s bank accounts, taxes, passwords, images, social security and much more that back in the day was written down on paper and kept in a safe or just simply committed to memory. I am guilty of falling into the trap of “Googlability” and the reliance of technology to remember everything that is important to me. “Remember this password?” Done. “Create a password”? seconds later I’ve updated my 1Password app. Tons and tons of information about my life is all stored in various servers, supposedly secure and hidden from everyone except me.
It’s been fine so far, so what brings me here to write about it? Well it’s this heartbleed bug that has many people riled up right now. Even in 2014 information is stolen, and so my childhood fears come running back to me tenfold. If anyone gets a hand on my information now, it would be far worse than someone googling me and showing up at my doorstep (because hey, little me kind of forgot I didn’t have to open the door if that happened).
As soon as I read about the bug I was actually a bit depressed thinking about the number of usernames and passwords I would have to change and was also scared I would forget about some accounts that I didn’t even remember making a couple of years ago. Thankfully it turns out that most of the websites I use were not vulnerable, but this is probably because I still don’t spread my information to a variety of websites and the big name companies have enough money to get first class security because they lead the technological world.
But information will never truly be secure. The measurement of how secure something is isn’t whether someone can access it or not. It’s measured by the amount of time it would take someone to break into it. Once we deem this amount of time to be far too long, we consider something “safe”. But computers are computers, programs are programs, and everything is just bits bytes code and hardware. It can be broken, it can be hacked, it can be changed, and some day people may figure out how to do it very fast.
So I leave with a reminder to everyone to never truly trust the internet. Every time you sign up for an account on a website, remember in the back of your mind that if or when your data is stolen from this website, what do you have to lose? Use it to gauge your own measure of internet security. Sometimes being a Joe Shmoe on the internet isn’t so bad. (but who am I kidding, my name is at the top of this very page).