Online Privacy

When a celebrity or someone in the media spotlight are admitted into the hospital one of the first deviant acts the paparazzi do is to search for the medical reports, which are usually easy to access online. In a place where one should feel safe, they have to worry about paparazzi searching for any kind of information alluding to why they are in the hospital. Another situation where records are easy access to the public is when one is arrested. These types of situations put people at a high risk for invasion of their own privacy.

People argue all the time that the paparazzi or normal spectators are invading their privacy, but in all actuality up to a certain extent they aren’t. Once a line is crossed that is when privacy invasion occurs. Privacy invasion occurs almost daily when normal citizens go online. This usually happens when one tries to by an item online using their credit card. A similar situation is when one’s bank account is hacked into because the security question and password were easy for a hacker to guess.

The question we ask is how do we protect ourselves from our own information leaking out onto the Internet? Many identities have been stolen from people trusting the sites that they give their credit card numbers to. Others trust their online banks to make sure no one can hack into their bank account and steal their money. There have been many researchers’ to test the methods of how people go about stealing these identities. One of these researchers’ is a Rutgers computer scientist named Danfeng Yao. She and her students came up with a new tactic to help strengthen online privacy and make it more secure.

When most people login to their emails or bank accounts they are asked to enter in their password and answer a few short security questions. These questions usually pertain to something that can be easily remembered but also easily guessed by a hacker. In an article called Computer Scientists Work To Strengthen Online Security, Yao talks about her new form of questions to be asked when signing onto an account online. She states, “We call them activity-based personal questions, sites could ask you, 'When was the last time you sent an e-mail?' Or, 'What did you do yesterday at noon?’” Studies from this research have shown that the harder the questions are the less likely the potential intruders will be able to answer them right. Yao said, "We want the question to be dynamic, the questions you get today will be different from the ones you would get tomorrow."

With Yao’s tactic in place, the hope is that the hundreds of online privacy attacks a day will be narrowed down and the number of people’s identities that are stolen a day will be lessened. My view is that everyone should do their part in making it harder for hacker’s to steal their identities. They should make their passwords and security questions something that they will only know and understand. Once that happens, I am sure we will see once again that people can have privacy online.