In today’s digital age, we have information at our fingertips. Whether it is a quick question on our favourite search engine, a tweet, news blogs, and/ or scholarly articles. The consumption of knowledge is more significant than ever before, but what is the trade-off we are making in terms of our privacy?
A major concern in our privacy on the internet is the online tracking that occurs through location services. All of us have instinctually clicked on the ‘Allow all cookies’ banner option that pops up on our screen without even second guessing what that may allow the website to track, within and across our devices. Cookie profiling allows websites to track your overall activities online and have access to a detailed roadmap of your browsing, in real-time. Data tracker is bigger than ever before, providing us with insights into our interests but also motivating us to spend time/money on our interests. But is it a question of morality? Aren’t we at the end of the day allowing them access to our digital selves?
In a few instances, the person is aware that they are voluntarily giving information and that it is being collected, but in many others, they are unaware of the data they are leaving online, of who can access it, and further, have no control over how it is stored or used, once they click submit. A few innocent keystrokes for one individual could create a window of opportunity for hackers/identity thieves to have a payday. According to the Global Tech Support Scam research in India conducted by Microsoft in 2021, there was a spike of 69% in digital fraud encounters and 31% of the individuals lost money in 2020-21. A more shocking statistic is that 2,12,485 incidents of e-fraud have taken place and were reported to CERT-In (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) in the first two months of 2022 which is double the cases in 2018 (Basu, 2022).
Every one of us has some footprint on a social platform, be it networking on LinkedIn, posting a picture on Instagram, retweeting an idea on Twitter or an update on how our family is doing on Facebook. But sometimes we come in contact with fake ids which are so obviously not anyone we know, but if performed well by professional ‘phishers’, sometimes we might not even be able to see the difference between a fake identity and one of our friends. Phishing can also have extremely dangerous outcomes as it can often be linked with identity theft and the victim may be oblivious to the fact that they are not speaking to Ms XYZ while revealing personal information about themselves and their loved ones.
There has been some legislature that has been passed under the Indian Information Technology Act, 2000, and the IT Amendment Act, 2008, to protect the interests of individuals that may become victims of internet crimes (Dalmia, 2017). But since technology is constantly growing and evolving, a loophole or technicality can always be found in data exploitation. For example, other information such as cookie tracking is not represented as it is not termed as personal/identifying information in India yet, hence, no law has been passed to restrict websites access to it, once the viewer allows it (Patnaik, 2021).
At the end of the day, we must, to the best of our abilities, try to be aware of the amount of information we are putting into the digital space and protect our interests. Using harder/unique passwords for your different logins, not oversharing on social sites, using trusted wifi networks and websites, and encrypting/password protecting important documents, could be the first step to having a safer experience online. As long as there is an opportunity to make a quick buck, whether, in the physical or the e-world, criminals will be willing to exploit that. Hence, it is always better to be safe than sorry, be mindful about what/how much to share on our platforms, and educate ourselves about both, the pros and cons, of the digital world around us.
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