When browsing the internet, I never really noticed if I was being totally secure or not. I mean I’m still as secure as I can get when I log into my bank accounts, and I make sure I’m using a secure connection whenever applicable, but I mostly trust the websites that I’m using to make sure my information is handled with care. One of the bigger problems I have with the Internet is that it’s convenient. Too convenient. Honestly, and I feel like a fool so you don’t have to scold me for this one, I’ve just gotten so lazy and comfortable with the internet. I’m definitely inviting some bad vibes in here, but I’ve never been hacked, my password has never been stolen, I’ve never lost any data that was unrecoverable, and I’ve never been catfished or had my identity stolen. So sometimes I see the Internet through rose-colored glasses. Excuse me while I go knock on wood.
Before this course, I cruised through the Internet without a care in the world, and now I can’t stop thinking about all those pages that I gave permission to on Facebook and how vulnerable I might be right now. One of the articles in this week’s reading definitely gave me pause: of the top 10 security basics, I think I was following maybe half of them. To be fair, part of my rent includes WiFi, so my wireless router is as secure as my landlady wants it to be. But I forget to back up my computer, and I definitely need to brush up on cleaning out my permissions.
It’s extremely convenient having the “Sign In with Facebook” button right there, so I use it pretty much every time. It saves me all of ten, maybe twenty seconds, but until now I was apparently too impatient to wait. I followed the Lifehacker article through to another one of theirs, which was a guide on how to clean out your permissions. It was a little dated, and Facebook has moved things around a little bit since the article was written, so the steps to getting to the same page were slightly different but not hard to navigate. That’s actually the first thing I’m going to do after this. Clean up all my permissions on Facebook, because I know it’s a lot. To be exact, I have 18 active apps, and a whopping 260 inactive apps. Some of them are old pages that no longer exist, but a lot of them are still active. And even though it says the permission has expired, this week has me paranoid times 100, so I’m planning an immense clean up.
I need to be more secure in how I browse the internet. With the way I use the internet right now, I’d have no one to blame but myself for any breaches of my personal data. Just because I haven’t had a bad experience yet doesn’t mean it’s never going to happen, and I’ve taken for granted the fact that I’ve been lucky thus far. This course has been amazing, and I’m grateful for everything I’ve learned these past 6 weeks. Thanks for everything!
