giovedì 14 maggio 2009

I'm here!!

Hi everybody!! First of all… all my apologies!! I’ve been missing lessons for some days and I didn’t “feed my child” as I promised to do in my very first post!! I had some problems… nothing serious… and now here I am again. I’m ready to start reflecting and doing my homework! I think I should begin with E-tivity 8... “Online Identity theft”, right?
This is one of the most discussed issues on TV and on the Internet… I have always been “obsessed” by the idea of somebody stealing someone else’s personal bits of information for illicit purposes!! There are so many ways that potential identity thieves can get your personal information. One of these for example is stealing your mail or search for personal information in your rubbish; so one way to avoid this could be tearing all your letters, receipts etc… into tiny pieces before throwing them away. I’ve always paid a lot of attention to this “annoying, but necessary” procedure… So keep all your personal information in a secure spot!! Shield your pin number when entering it into the cash machines to prevent card cloning or skimming! I always repeat these things to myself!! And pay a lot of attention when you are online of course!! Do I care about these things? Yes I do. As I’ve told you before, I’m quite obsessed about this! It could really make you paranoid, let's hope not, but it should at least make you aware and cautious! Online things may seem to be more complicated… The Internet is a place where you can do anything; stop using the Internet is not the right solution. We should learn how to protect ourselves and how to develop a critical use of it! We should be careful about the data we share for example. What about me? I’m part of the fantastic world of Facebook users! It sounded great to me “being in touch” with people from my childhood!! It was fun and amusing, till I started receiving “friendship requests” from people never seen before, or comments on my wall which I would have preferred being private…but these are “common risks” of social network sites, right? Anyway I read the article by Adam Cohen on New York Times about the impossibility for its users to quit the site and erase their personal information. I’ve disappeared from Facebook for a while, but then I found out (reading articles on the web) that my personal data were stored. Finally I came back to find that everything was exactly the way I left it…friends, wall messages, comments, mails etc…amazing! ;-) And nobody knew that “I’ve been away for a while”!! Thanks guys!! ;-) Anyway I tried to put privacy restrictions, but I don’t know if this works! My pictures and messages should be viewable by my friends only… I think!! I agree with A. Cohen when he say: ”It should be easy for users to disappear from a Web site that they have been part of, or simply to delete some information about themselves”. It’s fun being part of social networks, but when your mother has a look at your wall and tells you: “Do you have a good time in Padua, don’t you? (smiling maliciously) “…it’s quite embarrassing!!

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