You'll never be 100% safe as long as you're on the internet. You can, however, reach a point where you're as safe as you reasonably need to be. While it's tempting to get worried or scared when you hear about a looming conspiracy or a company that got hacked, just remember that online security isn't just about having the strongest lock. It's about using the right tools for the job and knowing when to take your data offline. And, above all else, don't panic when you hear that some scary policy is in effect, or some company screwed up with your data. It's not good when that happens, but it's not new, either. Yet the internet lives on.
Before filling any form or giving any data online always raises a question in the mind that are we safe, will be the data been provided be secured? The answer is YES!
It is very true that the cyber crime has increased a lot and it’s only because it’s the easiest possible way to track anyone’s personal data and so getting worried about your data is but obvious.
FTC, Federal Trade commission, an independent agency of US government established in 1914, it came into existence for protecting consumer data.For many companies, collecting sensitive consumer and employee information is an essential part of doing business. It’s FTC legal responsibility to take steps to properly secure or dispose of it.And it’s just not about FTC, every country has their commissions taking care of the data.
There are number of DATA PROTECTION LAWS which needs to be followed today so as to confirm the users being safe.Our Constitution has provided the law relating to privacy under the scope of Article 21 and the Information Technology Act, 2000.
What data is collected?
It’s ultimately the cookie from where the data about the user is fetched as cookies store the whole information but what kind of data are collected?
1. Login data
2. On every use of credit card for purchasing purpose, the trail of brand preference, place of shopping etc. left behind.
3. The data regarding the websites you visits which ultimately tells about your behavior.
4. Financial information such as Bank account or credit card or debit card or other payment instrument details.
5. Medical records and history.
6. Sexual orientation.
7. Through hacking, the hackers can whimsically alter anyone’s account.
8. Unsolicited e-mails are also a usual practice of gathering personal information of the users.
Provided data can be helpful to attribute a person’s character, like he is arrogant or gentle, etc. Then it will become so easy for someone to fool you if he knows your behavior.
But today in the technological world it’s not that easy as number of claws , protection to our data are their and thus we are quite secured.
Use of Personal data collected?
1. For marketing and promotional purposes
2. For Editorial and feedback purposes
3. Statistical analysis of user’s behavior
4. For product development
5. Record keeping
6. Content Improvement
7. Identifying information such as names , email address , postal , phone numbers etc. ( voluntarily provided by user )
8. Number of visitors on the site for account status.
Governments Are Spying on You?
Ever since we first heard about the NSA's massive surveillance database, conflicting reports and statements have emerged and it's hard to pin down exactly what happens with any level of certainty (as you might expect from a top secret surveillance program). How much data is stored, how easy it is to pull it up, how often a human being interacts with your specific name and, perhaps most important of all, how much private companies voluntarily hand data over instead of fulfilling legal requirements are all things that we have trouble knowing for sure.
Here's what we can safely assume: some information either about or created by you is probably stored somewhere. According to the deputy director of the NSA, speaking to a House judiciary committee, the NSA is able to perform a "second or third hop query" to acquire information on a suspected terrorist. This means that in addition to requesting data from a suspect, the agency is able to pull data from everyone that suspect has communicated with, everyone those people have communicated with, and then everyone those people have communicated with.
If you'd like to get a sense of what that kind of scale looks like, take a look at this tool from The Guardian. Using an average number of Facebook friends as a metric, it can show how many people you can interact with by proxy up to three hops. For a single person with the average number of Facebook friends, a three hop query could potentially include over five million people. Multiply that by the number of suspected terrorists and your chances of staying off a server somewhere are probably pretty slim.
Whether or not your data is actually on a government server somewhere is a bit irrelevant. You can't know for certain, you can't press a button and erase it, and the only recourse you have for changing this fact is a political shift. I'm not here to tell you what you need to believe on the subject. That's up to you. What's not up to you is that—for now at least—once you step on to the internet, some data of yours is probably getting swept up. Even if you use burner phones and encrypt everything, there's still not much you can do to stop this. It's okay to be outraged by this, but after years of shady policies and leaked practices, it shouldn't be a surprise anymore.
Web Sites Get Hacked
Of course, the main reason that the last section hasn't convinced us all to drop off the face of the internet is because most of us don't tend to find ourselves looking down the barrel of a full-scale investigation. It's a very serious concern in principle (and in reality for a minority of people), but largely, we quietly accept it until election time and life goes on. What about something more tangible, though?
Even if you're okay with government agencies collecting massive amounts of data for surveillance purposes, you probably don't want some random internet hacker to have access to your login information for major websites.
On that note, here's an incomplete list of major websites who have been hacked and had login information leaked over the last 18 months:
Adobe was hacked and 150 million user account IDs and passwords were leaked.
Dropbox was hacked leaving an undisclosed number of email addresses visible (and subsequently spammed).
LivingSocial was hacked and 50 million names, email addresses, and encrypted passwords were leaked.
Cupid Media was hacked, leaving 42 million names, addresses, birthdays, and plaintext passwords out in the open.
LinkedIn was hacked and over 6.5 million hashed passwords were published. While the corresponding email addresses were reportedly not released, some of the hashed passwords were converted to plain text.
Yahoo! Mail couldn't stop getting hacked for a period of a few months.
Now, in some cases, this isn't that big of a deal. Adobe immediately reset the passwords for everyone affected, and many of these hacks involve hashed passwords that are unlikely to be read anyway. However—and this is the important part—you'll never know which service you signed up with is going to get hacked next, nor do you know what security measures they use. Maybe when your account password leaks, it will be encrypted and reset immediately. Maybe it will be in plain text. Maybe you'll never hear about it at all. The one thing you can be pretty sure of is that even if nothing bad happens, if you're online long enough, some of your data will be accessible by people you don't want having access to it.
Of course, the potential damage is compounded if you use a common password, or re-use passwords on different accounts. We've talked before about how to use a password manager to help avoid the latter issue, yet easy-to-guess passwords still remain some of the most widely used. This actually means that if you practice good security habits, you might just be secure enough to not get eaten by that bear. However, as with the last section, it's not going to be a surprise the next time that you find a service you use got hacked. In fact, it will be a bigger surprise if, over the next decade, some piece of data belonging to you isn't leaked in a major hack.
Before filling any form or giving any data online always raises a question in the mind that are we safe, will be the data been provided be secured? The answer is YES!
It is very true that the cyber crime has increased a lot and it’s only because it’s the easiest possible way to track anyone’s personal data and so getting worried about your data is but obvious.
FTC, Federal Trade commission, an independent agency of US government established in 1914, it came into existence for protecting consumer data.For many companies, collecting sensitive consumer and employee information is an essential part of doing business. It’s FTC legal responsibility to take steps to properly secure or dispose of it.And it’s just not about FTC, every country has their commissions taking care of the data.
There are number of DATA PROTECTION LAWS which needs to be followed today so as to confirm the users being safe.Our Constitution has provided the law relating to privacy under the scope of Article 21 and the Information Technology Act, 2000.
What data is collected?
It’s ultimately the cookie from where the data about the user is fetched as cookies store the whole information but what kind of data are collected?
1. Login data
2. On every use of credit card for purchasing purpose, the trail of brand preference, place of shopping etc. left behind.
3. The data regarding the websites you visits which ultimately tells about your behavior.
4. Financial information such as Bank account or credit card or debit card or other payment instrument details.
5. Medical records and history.
6. Sexual orientation.
7. Through hacking, the hackers can whimsically alter anyone’s account.
8. Unsolicited e-mails are also a usual practice of gathering personal information of the users.
Provided data can be helpful to attribute a person’s character, like he is arrogant or gentle, etc. Then it will become so easy for someone to fool you if he knows your behavior.
But today in the technological world it’s not that easy as number of claws , protection to our data are their and thus we are quite secured.
Use of Personal data collected?
1. For marketing and promotional purposes
2. For Editorial and feedback purposes
3. Statistical analysis of user’s behavior
4. For product development
5. Record keeping
6. Content Improvement
7. Identifying information such as names , email address , postal , phone numbers etc. ( voluntarily provided by user )
8. Number of visitors on the site for account status.
Governments Are Spying on You?
Ever since we first heard about the NSA's massive surveillance database, conflicting reports and statements have emerged and it's hard to pin down exactly what happens with any level of certainty (as you might expect from a top secret surveillance program). How much data is stored, how easy it is to pull it up, how often a human being interacts with your specific name and, perhaps most important of all, how much private companies voluntarily hand data over instead of fulfilling legal requirements are all things that we have trouble knowing for sure.
Here's what we can safely assume: some information either about or created by you is probably stored somewhere. According to the deputy director of the NSA, speaking to a House judiciary committee, the NSA is able to perform a "second or third hop query" to acquire information on a suspected terrorist. This means that in addition to requesting data from a suspect, the agency is able to pull data from everyone that suspect has communicated with, everyone those people have communicated with, and then everyone those people have communicated with.
If you'd like to get a sense of what that kind of scale looks like, take a look at this tool from The Guardian. Using an average number of Facebook friends as a metric, it can show how many people you can interact with by proxy up to three hops. For a single person with the average number of Facebook friends, a three hop query could potentially include over five million people. Multiply that by the number of suspected terrorists and your chances of staying off a server somewhere are probably pretty slim.
Whether or not your data is actually on a government server somewhere is a bit irrelevant. You can't know for certain, you can't press a button and erase it, and the only recourse you have for changing this fact is a political shift. I'm not here to tell you what you need to believe on the subject. That's up to you. What's not up to you is that—for now at least—once you step on to the internet, some data of yours is probably getting swept up. Even if you use burner phones and encrypt everything, there's still not much you can do to stop this. It's okay to be outraged by this, but after years of shady policies and leaked practices, it shouldn't be a surprise anymore.
Web Sites Get Hacked
Of course, the main reason that the last section hasn't convinced us all to drop off the face of the internet is because most of us don't tend to find ourselves looking down the barrel of a full-scale investigation. It's a very serious concern in principle (and in reality for a minority of people), but largely, we quietly accept it until election time and life goes on. What about something more tangible, though?
Even if you're okay with government agencies collecting massive amounts of data for surveillance purposes, you probably don't want some random internet hacker to have access to your login information for major websites.
On that note, here's an incomplete list of major websites who have been hacked and had login information leaked over the last 18 months:
Adobe was hacked and 150 million user account IDs and passwords were leaked.
Dropbox was hacked leaving an undisclosed number of email addresses visible (and subsequently spammed).
LivingSocial was hacked and 50 million names, email addresses, and encrypted passwords were leaked.
Cupid Media was hacked, leaving 42 million names, addresses, birthdays, and plaintext passwords out in the open.
LinkedIn was hacked and over 6.5 million hashed passwords were published. While the corresponding email addresses were reportedly not released, some of the hashed passwords were converted to plain text.
Yahoo! Mail couldn't stop getting hacked for a period of a few months.
Now, in some cases, this isn't that big of a deal. Adobe immediately reset the passwords for everyone affected, and many of these hacks involve hashed passwords that are unlikely to be read anyway. However—and this is the important part—you'll never know which service you signed up with is going to get hacked next, nor do you know what security measures they use. Maybe when your account password leaks, it will be encrypted and reset immediately. Maybe it will be in plain text. Maybe you'll never hear about it at all. The one thing you can be pretty sure of is that even if nothing bad happens, if you're online long enough, some of your data will be accessible by people you don't want having access to it.
Of course, the potential damage is compounded if you use a common password, or re-use passwords on different accounts. We've talked before about how to use a password manager to help avoid the latter issue, yet easy-to-guess passwords still remain some of the most widely used. This actually means that if you practice good security habits, you might just be secure enough to not get eaten by that bear. However, as with the last section, it's not going to be a surprise the next time that you find a service you use got hacked. In fact, it will be a bigger surprise if, over the next decade, some piece of data belonging to you isn't leaked in a major hack.
