Question

How does our use of the Internet make it difficult to protect individual privacy and intellectual property? Identify two changes, either technical or behavioral, that you believe are crucial in order to improve this situation.

Answer 1

With the advancements in technologies, the number of data theft has increased and it has become very difficult to protect the privacy and intellectual property. The main reason behind the data theft is the carelessness of the user while visiting unknown links. When we use internet most of us do not read the policies and instructions given on particular sites and blindly accepts them. Another reason is downloading contents from websites which are not secure. We do not try to identify the sensitive contents while sharing the data across different websites which might have malicious contents. The use of same passwords for different sites also makes it difficult to protect privacy and intellectual property because it makes it easy for the hackers to access the data. Our tendency to use public Wi-Fi for accessing sensitive information is also a reason for the data theft because the public Wi-Fi spots are more susceptible to packet sniffing.

In order to avoid these problems we should change our behavior of using same passwords for different sites, should use complex passwords that are not related to our personal information like date of birth, name or favorites and change it regularly so that it would be difficult for the hackers to find the same. Another behavioral change which is crucial to avoid data theft is that we should refrain from clicking on unknown links and websites that are not secured because unsecured sites are having the maximum probability of having the malicious contents and data theft. Also we should not use the public Wi-Fi spots for accessing sensitive information like bank details and other important data to reduce the chances of packet sniffing.