This week’s readings and lectures have opened up my eyes to how, in a sense, dangerous being online can be. I always knew of hackers or being watched by the government, but I’ve never really thought it could happen to me. The only security measures I take are making a hard to guess, complicated password. Often times though I use this same hard to guess password on a variety of my logins, which in hindsight isn’t the best. This isn’t really a smart idea since if the hacker gets that one password, they could hack into all my accounts.
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But something that stuck out to me in the lecture where Dan was discussing security and encryption, while using Skype. He says that him and his wife use Skype often because they don’t particularly care if anyone was to listen in. He said there would be nothing worth listening to. Which that’s how I feel. I’m not a US national security journalist, a black-market criminal, or someone working for a corporate business to steal someone else’s data, so I’m not too worried about if someone were to listen in. If someone were to listen in or somehow hack into my social media pages or email, all they would find would be a lot of irrelevant conversations, funny memes, or the hundreds of selfies I have of myself, so not really much to benefit from.
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As an avid online, and in store, shopper the only thing I would be worried about is if someone where to get my bank and credit card information. A precautionary measure I take with that is that I have alerts set up to be sent to my phone when any purchase is made with my cards. So, I would know right away if someone were to have my card information, as soon as they use it.
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But a security measure I think would be very useful, and one that I’m thinking of using is a password manager. From this article we learn of LastPass, which is a password manager that allows you to create a master password and just import all other login information. It also helps with deleting information that isn’t needed but is open to threats from hackers. Like I said before I often use the same password for a variety of my log in since its hard to remember all of them. With a password manager like LastPass I think it would greatly enhance the security of my information, help with remembering passwords, and also help with deleting information that could be open to a breach.
