Library Subject Guides
Be careful what you click on...
No, really. It's easy to get taken in. Even members of IT get caught out. So please, please, take a look at the resources below... especially the link to our phishing advice.
The act of speaking your mind on the internet can lead you open to all manner of abuse, and this risk is increased for certain groups. Yes, you can ignore some of it. But you can only ignore so much. And let’s be clear: you shouldn’t have to ignore anything of this kind.
In her Guide to Internetting While Female, Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian defines six forms of online trolling. Perhaps you’ve experienced some for yourself…
Feminist Frequency have produced a guide to protecting yourself from online harassment which offers best-practice for online privacy and safety, as well as advice for reporting harassment. It’s important to have the confidence to recognise problems as quickly as possible so that you can speak out against abusers, document their abuse and report them. It’s also important to remember that if someone harasses or threatens you online, it’s not you that is in the wrong.
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Here, Dr David Beer explains how we live in an environment where the amount of data accumulated about us is huge, and contemplates how this might affect the way that we behave in ‘real life’.
The information trail we leave online isn’t just a reputational concern. We can give away a lot of personal details, and while for the most part this will be just noise in the internet, it is information that can be used against us, as IT expert Tom Smith explores:
The TV series Hunted provides an effective (and entertaining) illustration of how our online activity can betray our movements, our intentions and our personal networks. In some cases, confiscated devices, phishing attempts and hacked passwords are used as a means of gaining sensitive information, but all too regularly the clues hide in plain sight: on open social media accounts that any of us can see. If you're posting in an open forum, anybody can access that information.
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Tweeting something like…
…is obviously a bad idea. But communicating even snippets of such information has risks, because snippets can build into a larger picture about you and your circumstances.
It isn't just what we post that poses a potential risk. Our accounts themselves may be sharing more than we might think. If you've ever seen your Facebook profile picture staring back at you from the comments section of a blog post, or if you've seen adverts targeting your interests, you'll have an idea of the kind of thing that can get passed around. It's a good idea to go through your social media security settings with a fine-toothed comb now and again, to lock down as much as you're able, but inevitably there is a tradeoff between security and functionality.
There are other measures you can take to stay private online. For more sensitive activity you could use the privacy mode on your web browser, and there are browser extensions like Privacy Badger, Ghostery and uBlock Origin (the latter installed on University instances of Chrome and Firefox) which can be used to block tracking activity and social media integration. But perhaps the simplest way of staying private on the internet is to not share personal information in the first place.
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Whichever side you are positioning yourself on, it’s difficult to escape the evidence that, in the internet age, when we use free applications, platforms, and services, often the trade off is that we ‘pay’ the price of using these services by allowing them to harvest our personal data. In short:
You don’t have to do much searching to find examples of companies building enormous databases filled with billions of our interactions, searches, website visits, purchases and other personal information. Sometimes they will be trading this information to advertising and marketing agencies to ‘personalise’ our online experience and encourage sales based on our previous behaviours; at other times they will be using this information to inform the development of their products based on those behaviours. Even a privacy application may be making money out of your data in some way.
You may consider it a fait accompli, then, that to make use of new technologies you have to forfeit your privacy, but one might take a more positive view: that we can still protect our privacy if we are savvy about reading the terms and conditions, especially the privacy policy. If we are more aware of how applications are using our data, we can then make an informed choice about whether we are happy with what they are doing or whether we instead need to select another product. Often we can even change the settings in products to prevent out data being shared.
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