Is Personal Information Private on the Internet?
Whether it be through social networks, online banking, online schooling, or working over a company’s large network, people are always connected to the internet. The use of computers, tablets, smartphones, gaming consoles, and other internet capable devices are now a part of everyone’s daily life. People enjoy free content, however what they are getting is still coming at a very high price, and it is now costing them their personal information.
In 1995 Compuserve, America Online, and Prodigy began providing dial-up internet access to users, one year later approximately 45 million people were using the internet for tasks like sending an email or downloading a useful program or game. Fast forward 20 years later to 2015 where 3,185,996,155 people are on the internet doing everything from banking and paying bills, to communicating with one another through social networks. “Cases of online fraud have increased threefold compared to 2010, partly due to consumers having a large number of web accounts” according to a study. With today’s accessibility of the internet come many risks. Most things require users to enter names, passwords, credit card information, date of birth and other personal information. With there being so many different uses for the internet it can be very hard for someone to keep track of where they are directly and indirectly putting their information.
The average user has no fewer than 40 online accounts, of those 40 accounts the average user only has five different passwords. The number one way for an account to be compromised is by password theft due to weak passwords. Passwords can also be stolen in Phishing scams where the attacker will masquerade as a trustworthy individual in an email; the recipient will be taken to a phony website which will prompt for credentials in hopes that the user will enter their information. Keyloggers are another way in which a user is at risk; a Keylogger is a malicious piece of software that usually runs in the background logging each and every keystroke. Account credentials, credit card numbers, and bank account information can be stolen and sent back to the attacker all without the user knowing. Large data breaches have also been a common way for information to be appropriated, just last month Yahoo confirmed that 500 million user accounts along with their names, email addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, and passwords were stolen in 2014.
Advertisers now know the account holders name, age, social security number, gender, phone number, address, religion, political affiliation, income, education level, real estate history, occupation, and what they are interested in buying online. These free websites sell and share the user’s information to companies that target marketing and advertising on specific groups. Users do not even have the legal right to stop their information from being shared, although some data broker vendors, the companies that collect then sell personal information, will allow the user to opt out of having their information shared by visiting https://www.privacyrights.org/data-brokers and looking through each vendor and selecting “opt out.” According to the Federal Trade Commission they have also issued orders to nine of these data brokerage companies where they are required to provide information about how they are using and collecting data. This information will help study privacy practices in the data broker industry.
While personal information is no longer completely safe it will not stop people from using the internet. As technology advances and the accessibility of the internet are improving it will only put everyone at an even greater risk. Maintaining a secure password, changing it at least every six months, having a good anti-spyware program, and sharing as little information as possible will only minimize these risks. It seems like it’s only a matter of time before everyone becomes a victim.
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Sources:
Internet Timeline. Retrieved from http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0193167.html
Online Fraud: too many accounts, too few passwords. Retrieved from http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/online-fraud-too-many-accounts-too-few-passwords-1089283
FTC to Study Data Broker Industry's Collection and Use of Consumer Data. Retrieved from https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/12/ftc-study-data-broker-industrys-collection-use-consumer-data