Privacy

Wikipedia defines Privacy as the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively. In essence privacy is just the ability to hide information that you don't want to share. Privacy is an extremely important aspect of our society. Without our personal privacy we have no ability to hide anything, no matter how embarrassing or personal it might be. Most pyschologists agree that keeping a set of boundaries is crucial to our mental health, and if we disclose everything we are liable to having certain psychological problems. Privacy on the internet is an extremely important aspect of today's society, and an aspect of society that has had an influence on me personally. I learned the hard way about the importance of internet safety. Last year I was in the library on UB learns sorting through my classes and checking my schedule. After about 20 minutes I got up and went to the bathroom without logging out of my UBlearns. When I got back from the bathroom I started checking my classes again but I noticed that something was different. Someone had dropped one of my classes. At first I couldn't believe that someone would do something like that. But after I thought about it I realized that the fact of the matter is that we live in a world where anything is possible. Even though I was only away from the computer for a few minutes I left myself vulnerable to an internet predator. It's scary to think about all the ways that predators can use the internet to take advantage of innocent people. This experience taught me how important it is to practice safe internet use. Never again will I leave a computer unintended while I'm logged in. Unfortunately there are so many aspects to the internet that it is difficult to fully protect ourselves on all possible fronts. Even if people take every neccessary precaution there are still predators that are able to hack into innocent people's accounts. These days people use the internet for everything. People shop on the internet, do their banking on the internet, and divulge all types of other information on the internet. Although the internet provides us with a very convenient medium for all these things, it also can be dangerous. Internet privacy is extremely important. If hackers can gain access to someones personal accounts numbers over the internet they will immediately hold in their hands the ability to ruin that person's life. It is extremely important that the US government imposes strict penalties for internet predators. If predators find out that they can committ these acts and only face minimal penalties then we will continue to live in a world where internet and identify theft is very prevalent.


Internet Privacy, Wikipedia.com, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interniet_privacy
Cyberbullying, UrbanDictionary.com, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cyberbullying