COM125 Week 5: Identity: Unknown

I absolutely love when someone is setting up a new e-mail account or developing a new screen name for AOL Instant Messenger and it takes that person a good couple hours to make sure their identification name is perfect and suites them. I understand why this is a process that people often do not just dive right into. According to Masum, "Since there is no absolute objective reputation quantity stamped on people’s foreheads, measurable proxies are necessary…." Often times, people want to associate something positive or interesting about themselves into their user name that sets them apart from everyone else. A person's user name is very important; it is the first thing that someone sees when talking that person over the internet, and/or is the first name that comes up when receiving an e-mail. The internet proposes more risk to a person's identity than something off the internet does. What I mean by this is that over the internet, there are a million and one ways people can find information about you and gain access to all of your personal things, and people have certainly done this. This is the reason people create these "identification names" in the first place, to protect themselves from fraud and unnecessary information exchange.

With managing school, work, and a social life, I have developed many online user names in the past. Currently, for talking to my friends on the internet and sending e-mail to my friends and family, I use the identification of 'NooCH717'. This may not mean anything to a lot of people but to me, it is what I have been called by certain family and friends for a long time now and I like the fact that when I am on the internet chatting, it reminds me of my family and friends calling me by this nickname. I do not have a strong interest in online gaming or anything of that sort so my identification name essentially is between me, my family, and my friends. With more professional matters such as school and work, my identification name is just 'djlisi'. Keeping this plain and simple allows me to appear professional and proficient. For example, if I was at an interview for a part-time job and was asked to fill out some paperwork containing my e-mail address, name, address, etc, and in the box for e-mail I wrote: 'HotLaXPartier6969', I feel this would set me off on the wrong foot professionally and would give people reason to prejudge me or think twice about hiring me. When thinking about online user names and identification names, often times people think of reputations associated with them but also, people need to realize that before the reputation came the first impression.

Honestly, I really do not think it would be that difficult to obtain someone else's identification. Look at the number of people on MySpace and Facebook alone that reveal extremely personal information such as their phone numbers, addresses, hometowns, where they attend school, work information, and so on and so on. Plugging that information into a system I am sure people can find banking information easily with a little research, car information, etc. Let us just take one example to prove my point. Say someone knows your school e-mail address. If you have not personalized your password, it is something that is not hard to get a hold of. At Buffalo, passwords are simply the first four digits of your birthday and the last six digits of your UB card. Personally, I do not think this is a very efficient way to pass out passwords to students. Even though many students SHOULD change their passwords immediately, many do not because of various reasons. In gaining someone's UBit name and password, you have access to their grades, schedule, e-mail and many other personal accounts of a college student. According to Forbes.com, "New identity verification and authentication technologies will provide further security, although the rollout and networking of these devices will take time." I think many companies releasing this information technologies are learning as we are that there are always going to be new ways hackers and identity thefts can gain access to information which explains the time factor.

Creating online identities in a respectable fashion is a great way to not disclose personal information that could be picked up by anyone over the internet. One needs to be careful yet aware that their online identity however, can define a perception of how people view them.



References

Donath, J. (1996). Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community. Retrieved February 21, 2007, from http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html

Forbes Inc. (April 2005). Hooked on Phishing. Retrieved February 21, 2007, from http://www.forbes.com/business/2005/04/29/cz_0429oxan_identitytheft.html

Masum, Hassan and Zhang, Yi–Cheng. (July 2004). Manifesto for the Reputation Society First Monday, volume 9, number 7. Retrieved February 21, 2007, from http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_7/masum/index.html

COM125 Week 4: Are you stalking me?

When I think about privacy, I think about my everyday life and how it would be affected if privacy were a luxury of the past. Our twenty-first century lifestyle of 'wireless' this and 'easy access' that, has us on the internet a good portion of our time throughout a typical week. When thinking about a usual day in my life, I want privacy: when I am getting out of the shower and getting dressed, when I am studying, doing homework, reading, on my cell phone, going to the bathroom, and so on…. That is a lot of privacy, and that is only looking at one day out of the thousands I have already spent on this earth. I would define privacy as anything or anytime the seclusion of myself or information regarding myself is intended to be without disturbance or intrusion. Providing this definition, do people today, given their 'everything internet' (dealing with more activities online than not) lives, think about the internet as something they need to be protected from? According to Sullivan, "The simple act of surrendering a telephone number to a store clerk may seem innocuous." How many times have we set up accounts online where we give our names, addresses, and phone numbers? I am sure many, and why do we half of the times not think twice about disclosing this personal information over the internet which reaches millions of people everyday? This information for all we know could be given to hackers, credit card thieves, or other people or places that pose a threat. I believe the internet is a great place like any other, but any great place has a few problem areas which need to be brought to people's attention and looked after.

Why is it that every time I open my e-mail account and sign in under a secure location that several e-mails in my inbox read, "Hi Dominick, we have the perfect car for you!" or "Hi Dominick, want to increase your penis size?" or "Dominick, Buffalo has a lot to offer, visit our website to find out what you've been missing!" It is like the companies behind these personalized e-mails search out and finds my e-mail address and the name of the person that has access to that e-mail account, where I live, and anything else that relates to me. I might first admit that when I am online, I do not always take every precautionary measure in fully protecting myself. According to Wikipedia, the answer to this rather puzzling question could be, "On the Internet, certain organizations employ profiling of people's web browsing, collecting the URLs of sites visited. The resulting profiles may or may not link with information that personally identifies the people who did the browsing." I did not know that when I signed up for Road Runner high-speed internet, someone was going to be monitoring my every online mouse click! Why, or the better question might be how do certain organizations have the right to essentially stalk internet users? It is not that I didn't know what people will do for a little business and to make money, it is just that you never think something can happen to YOU personally.

As more and more e-mails kept entering my inbox, I was beginning to get annoyed. I decided to do a few things that would put me at less risk with fraud and would put me in a more comfortable atmosphere (what it should be) when I am on the internet. I updated my personal information on all of my internet accounts, and by updated I mean deleted. So far, I have not noticed a significantly less amount of e-mails involving my name probably because those company's information systems probably already have my personal data stored. What I can expect though, is that the number of these e-mails should not increase on a day-to-day basis and if I cannot win completely, at least I slowed them down or lead them away from my trail.

Looking at the internet in a privacy lane of vision, in some aspects it has become a place where hunters seek out the weakest link and strike when the moment is right. Even when spy protection programs are installed and internet users take all the necessary precautions in protecting their privacy, the internet, along with anything else in life, will always be outrun and out beat by those who find ways to overcome it.

References

Data privacy. (2007, February 8). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 00:30, February 16, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Data_privacy&oldid=106538402

Internet privacy. (2007, February 14). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 23:26, February 14, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Internet_privacy&oldid=108031912

Sullivan, Bob. (October 17, 2006) Privacy under attack, but does anybody care? MSNBC Interactive. Retrieved February 15, 2007 from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15221095/