ONLINE COMMUNITIES: Loss of Privacy

“Machines will recongnize physical attributes like a voice or fingerprint,” states Cairncross in his Trendspotter’s Guide to New Communications (Bucy, 2005, p. 9). This trend has been available for a while. Laptop computers have fingerprint scanning, phones use voice commands and many security systems have a combination of both.

Secruity on the Internet and online communities is a different story. People release valuable information and are attached to countless websites. Besides the main ones, people are connecting to websites offering match making, jobs and health tips all requiring personal information. There are unlimited oppurtunties for people to steal identities, decode our passwords  and tap into our lives. “The solution urged by the experts is to abandon passwords — and to move to a fundamentally different model, one in which humans play little or no part in logging on. Instead, machines have a cryptographically encoded conversation to establish both parties’ authenticity, using digital keys that we, as users, have no need to see,” (Stross, 2008). People also make the mistake of using the same simple passwords for too long. Even with complicated ones that are changed every few months have limited protection.

I don’t think people are fully aware of the dangers of exposure. We post videos. We blog. We chat. We let the world into our lives. Our lives are intertwined with millions of others in online communities. Millions of people that are unpredictable. Cyberspace has created a cyberlife. Is it only a matter of time before this cyberlife and real life fuse completely? Has it already happened?