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Blog #4: Privacy online

Facebook. The demise of us all. Or at least it’s Jennifer O’Brien’s. The first-grade teacher may lose her job, stated an article last week on Reuters.com, after calling her young students “future criminals.”

Could this be called a privacy issue? Why of course it could. First of all, it’s the same old claim, O’Brien voluntarily put her thoughts out there for the world to see, those thoughts are no longer private. Second of all, this issue isn’t so much a privacy one as it is a sensitivity one.

All these Facebook “privacy” issues that are popping up in the news, consist mostly of “inappropriate” statements or pictures. But Facebook is no more than the weak link in the chain of “ignorance is bliss.” If Facebook is guilty of one thing, it’s of making it a whole lot harder to be ignorant.

Privacy is lost on Facebook. All Facebook does is show the real us: What people really think, how people really act, what people really look like when they’re drunk. It’s the evidence. Just because we wouldn’t see it if it wasn’t posted on the Book, doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.

Everyone’s been in this situation. We’ve all had embarrassing pictures posted of us, we’ve all devised status’s that we later regret, some of us have even been caught by authority figures in sticky online-depicted situations.

But this is what I want to know: Who’s the rat? I mean really, I will be the first to say it, half O’Brien’s class is probably going to be future criminals. How did her Facebook post travel from her measly 333 friends to the parents of her students and further still, the principal of the school?

True, perhaps she should have kept her thoughts to herself instead of volunteering them to the online world. True, maybe she should have been more courteous to the little munchkins that she’s entrusted to oversee everyday. But is it also not true that the little brats give her hell seven hours a day, five days a week?

Apparently, O’Brien’s complete status had been updated to, "I'm not a teacher - I'm a warden for future criminals!" She wrote the status after her students allegedly hit her and stole money from her.

Would parents sue if she said the same thing to their faces in a parent-teacher conference? How is it different that the words were stated behind the parents backs rather than to their faces? Where they more dangerous this way? No student was named.

Teachers are people too. They are allowed to express their frustration in their everyday jobs to the online world just like the rest of us do. And parents out there need to toughen up a little. Yes, these are their darling children, their darling children that stole money from their teacher.

We are human beings and we are going to do what we want to do, say what we want to say, and hopefully tiptoe the terrible stuff through the our newsfeeds. This matter all comes down to who is smart enough to not get caught and who is stupid enough to flaunt the evidence that evicts them.

If parents and teachers are going to cause such a hullabaloo and be so damn dramatic about having online profiles (aka Facebook pages), perhaps they should just sign off and leave it to those of us who are little less sensitive. Those of us who use it for fun, not to fish around for the trouble that it stirs up.

Blog #3: Cybercrime

While doing a little bit of in-depth research about cybercrime, I was interested to find Estonia in the title of so many articles. Estonia is the center of European countries to concentrate on threats and fight cybercrime, but the crime still seems to be flourishing, and the punishments for those caught, increasing.

 The most recent article, posted on Wednesday, November 9, 2011, details the arrest of six Estonians and one Russian who have been wreaking havoc on computers since 2007. The individuals could face prison terms anywhere between five to 30 years.

Now, the first thought that passed through my head was how miserable the prison conditions are in that area of Europe. But are their crimes really worth up to 30 years in prison?

Their massive scheme earned them a whopping $14 million and infected an estimated four million computers in over 100 countries, including several NASA computers. But thirty years? That’s a lifetime. How did we let them get away with their massive fraud for more than four years?

 If you ask me, they don’t deserve that severe of a punishment as much as we deserved the consequences we suffered for those years they got away with it. If our technological abilities are that much weaker than that of Estonian hackers, then we deserve to be tortured by their computer viruses.

I understand how dangerous the growing problem of cybercrime is. I understand the delicate information that countries store in computers, information that could lead to their demise if snatched by the wrong hands, but countries need to focus on protection plans that prevent attacks rather than hunting criminals from 2007 to 2011 and then attacking the attacker and jailing them for thirty years.

Technology is developing so rapidly and so inexpensively that nearly everyone has a computer and internet. And anyone with the internet at their fingertips can become a hacker. The funny thing is, we hand out technology so readily but so few people really know how to use it or understand the power they are capable of with the machines in their households.

However, although I believe that the key to protection is prevention, and countries are trying to tackle this approach quickly, I also believe that no matter how prepared we become, there will always be hackers that are smarter, faster and more capable than the government. It’s the consequence we suffer from allowing free and ready internet access to the world.

Which is worse, the threat of cybercrime? Or the regulation of internet access? And is it solely the responsibility of the government to create protection for the public? Or can the public do something more to protect themselves than simply purchasing Norton and not emailing their social security number?

Almost two thirds of all adult web users globally have fallen victim to some sort of cybercrime, according to the 2011 Norton Cybercrime Report. But if you ask me, I’d rather deal with that all day, any day, rather than lose my internet privileges. Of course, I’m also not NASA and don’t have highly secretive information to hide…