On the mind of Hasan Abbas
The 2020 year was full of great events that are unique in the history. The most significant one is the Coronavirus pandemic. At the beginning of this pandemic, and when the global lockdown started, most people turned their education and work to online. Even though not all people are experts on education and work online, all the people in the world pretend they can fit in with that challenge, with regardless of all the risks that can be generated out of this huge step. The biggest challenge for people while learning and working online is how to protect their privacy. As all people who use internet know, there are many websites and companies use the cookies and private information about people for commercial purposes. Meanwhile, many other illegal activities use information collected through websites to exploit people. In our country, Lebanon, we are not familiar with online education or work because it is not even admitted in our country before the pandemic. Therefore, we should raise awareness for all people about how to protect privacy online. Undoubtedly, online safety is complicated, but there are some tips for making ourselves as much safe online as possible.
To make a research before you submit a consent for accessing your cookies can be the best safety measure. A cookie is a file sent from a website to your computer to get personal information.
Sometimes it is for legal purposes. There are some educational online resources and job websites that ask for permission to access your private information. Before you give this consent, you should make a research about the website or the source, and check its liability. Generally, there are some hackers and social engineers exploited people’s need for online jobs and online resources to get their information for phishing or commercial purposes. In a few minutes, you can protect yourself from those people.
Social media should be approached carefully, especially when all people are locked down and using internet continuously. When people post their job position and location, education degree, or residence address, they are more vulnerable and easy to get hacked. There are a lot of criminals and tricksters who tend to search for useful information through social media. Therefore, people should not post their location on websites and social media, when that post can be seen by strange people. In addition, financial information can be risky to get posted.
Children online safety is a very important issue. Children can be affected easily by hackers and illegal websites. They sometimes advertise to kids to deceive them to download some games or pictures that contain viruses. Parents take the big part of the responsibility of protecting their children from online deceitfulness. They should check their children’s devices regularly and reset privacy settings to make sure the device is still safe.
To sum it all, online privacy is a contemporary issue that should be taken seriously if people want to stay safe. It is more like suicide to let ourselves unsafe in this online world, especially because our country suffers from deteriorated circumstances. We should take care about ourselves and our children to prevent criminals and illegal phishing from completing their bad deeds.
Online safety can make our country better.