Tag: Technology

Digital security & conclusions on digital identity

--Originally published at Digital Identity

Introduction

Over the last days I’ve been writing about the differences between your personal physical identity and the digital identity, on how to start building your identity online, the importance of presence, being visitors or residents, and digital education and citizenship. But what about the problems that the things we post can generate in a world where everyone think different and has a different personality? How can we keep our identity safe from those that only want to benefit from others?

These questions have different and multiple answers that goes from restricting what we publish to the use of programs to protect your passwords to prevent identity theft or even the use of different identities on different websites all these actions really depend on the risk we might be exposed to.

How people perceive their online security

  • As I posted before there is a BCG ‘s representative survey of more than 3,000 European consumers revealed that 88% of people who are online consider at least one industry or sector a threat to their privacy.(Boston Consulting Group, 2012)
  • In 2014 a PewResearch Center released a study on online harassment, that revealed that 73% of online users from the 2,849 interviewed have seen someone being harassed and 40% have actually suffered themselves. Also 66% of internet users that experienced online harassment said it most recently on a social networking site or app (Duggan, 2014).online-harassment1

This are just some surveys that have been conducted but over internet you can find a lot of information on what people think about its security, but how can we actually protect our identity or take measures to be safer online?

 Restricting what you post

Even as I posted before and as Amy Burvall says “post about anything”, should be actually completed as follows “post about anything as long as it is morally correct”. When posting you need to take into consideration the consequences you might experience by doing so, any post is subject to generate a reaction on people that can be bad or good depending on the context and the content of what you post.

It is recommended to avoid mentioning publicly where do you live, where will you go, and any information that can be used to get on your account. If you really want to keep low your profile, you should remember that the information you have online is paired with the privacy you have so if you got less information you are safer.

The passwords and some useful tips

There are passwords for almost everything online, the Facebook account, email, Twitter, for mention some of them. But most of the time many people don’t know how to create a password that at the same time will be safe enough to avoid guessing it and easy to remember when needed. That’s why the “12345678” and “password” passwords still so popular(Titcomb, 2016).

  • Use two step authentication: Email, social media, and other sites allow you to turn on 2-step verification which asks for a code from an app or texts you a number to enter every time you want to log in, this protect you in the way that if the person that is trying to get into your account figure out your password it will also need to have your phone to access the site he is trying.
  • Use different email accounts and different password on each site: This will protect you even more, because if you only use one mail for all your accounts and the password of that mail is compromised, the one that access to the mail can change the password of your other accounts.

Videoconference

Conclusions

Digital identity involves a set of concepts that I’ve written about in the last posts. It is important to consider all the aspects that make up this identity and figure out how to protect it by remembering that everything you post will have a consequence for good or bad. It also vital to remember being a good citizen on the web and that all rules that apply in the real world also apply on internet, the empathy online is a concept we should never forget and we need to be open to other cultures and have tolerance to accept their ideas when differ from ours.

References

Boston Consulting Group. (2012, November). The Value of Our Digital Identity. Retrieved September 27, 2016, from http://www.libertyglobal.com/PDF/public-policy/The-Value-of-Our-Digital-Identity.pdf

Duggan, M. (2014, October 22). Online Harassment. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/

Titcomb, J. (2016, March 23). Do you have one of the most common passwords? They’re ridiculously easy to guess. Retrieved September 30, 2016, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/01/26/most-common-passwords-revealed—and-theyre-ridiculously-easy-to/


The online presence

--Originally published at Digital Identity

Introduction

What you do on internet? How much time you spend on it? What is its main use? This are some questions that if asked to different people you will get different answers maybe to all of them. But what has to do this with online presence, well, everything. The way we interact with internet, the websites we visit when being online and almost anything we do, determines our type of presence online, our main roles (as visitor or residents) and our priorities when it comes to travel the web.

The Presence

Presence, as Bonnie Stewart say is multi-faceted, that means it involves a set of different areas. Even if sometimes we lack of a type of presence we still have a kind of it. An example for this is when you assist to a class, even if you don’t talk to anyone and don’t interact at all, you will still have physical presence and some sort of influence in the perception others have from you.

An example for the different types of presence is a learning community where we have three mayor types of presence: cognitive, social and teaching all of them need to merge together in order to create a proper educational experience.

presence

The elements of a learning community. (Garrison, et al., 2000)

On internet something similar happens, we have different kinds of presence determined by the objective we are seeking. This interaction or type of presence can be easily represented with the concept of visitors and residents.

Visitors & Residents

vandr

photo retrieved from http://daveowhite.com/vandr/

Internet could be used for a variety of tasks that goes from researching and looking for particular information to posting on websites or social networks and talking with friends. The concept of visitors and residents tries to summarize the way people interact with the web, is main objectives when doing so and if there exist an interaction with other users or a creation of content each time someone gets online.

Visitors vs residents

This concept could be better understand if we compare the characteristics that can make be either a visitor or a resident.

Visitors

Being a visitor is the most common type of role we play when going on internet to look information. It is mainly going online for data and getting offline when finding it. Visitors use the web as a toolbox, actions are instrumental, this is that users leave no social trace online and the task is a priority(D. S. White & Cornu, 2011).

Examples of this can be searching for information for a research, looking for directions to go to a certain place, watching videos online (without commenting) and mostly anything that involves getting information or completing a task, actions that don’t require socialization.

Residents

The resident mode is the mode of the social presence as a resident when we decide to go online is to be present with other people, we life a portion of our lives online. Residents consider the web as a human, social connected place. This engagement leaves social traces, connections and content behind this interaction, synthesis is a priority. This mode also involves a highly visible state because of the content we leave behind, in blogs, social networks, and so on(D. White, 2014).

Examples of this role are publishing photos on social networks, publishing videos on YouTube, commenting on others blog’s or on their publications, tweeting or posting in your blog, and mainly all the actions that involve interacting with others online or adding information to the web, so that others can see it.

Other definitions

Personal: All the actions we do because we want to, using the web for our own personal purposes, like talking with friends and family or watching videos we like.

Institutional: This role involves everything that has to do with work, an example is to make a research for project or finding information to complete a homework.

The map

No role online is restricted, you can be either a resident in a certain time of the day and a visitor on other, and actually you can act as both depending on the context. The following map represents popular websites and the area that they can be classified depending on the interactions you have on it. This is merely illustrative and different people might use a social network for a complete different purpose. For example, someone who only gets to YouTube to watch videos because they like to will classify it as a personal-visitor, but a Youtuber (the one that publishes the videos) might classify this website as a resident- institutional if he makes money from it or simply as a resident-personal if he uploads videos only for sharing them with his friends and family, but this are only some combinations.

12947691804_a5a77889b2_o

flickr photo by jisc_infonet https://flickr.com/photos/jiscinfonet/12947691804 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Interview

https://soundcloud.com/luis-fernando-amador-604664412/online-presence-interview

Videoconference

References 

Garrison, D., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical Inquiry in a Text-Based Environment: Computer Conferencing in Higher Education. The Internet and Higher Education 2(2-3): 87-105.

White, D. S. (2014, September 9). Visitors & Residents. Retrieved from http://daveowhite.com/vandr/

White, D. S., & Cornu, A. L. (2011). Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


What is Digital Identity?

--Originally published at Digital Identity

The concept of digital Identity is based on the concept of personal identity or simply identity, that are the set of traits, characteristics, ideas, opinions, and basically the personality that make us different from the others. Some people might share some of our characteristics and opinions, but that doesn’t mean it will share the same identity. The term digital involves everything that has to do with electronic devices, telecommunications and the use of technology. Therefore, the term digital identity means the identity we have or we share with the use of technology or communications. Much simpler the identity we have online, on the internet.

Personal Identity vs Digital Identity

Personal identity

  1. Is document based: Identity is based on physical documents.
  2. Isolated: Information is not interconnected and do not enable aggregation.
  3. Inflexible: Identity is codified in documents as a limited and standardized set of information.

Digital identity

  1. Digital Based: Identity exists as a set of digital records.
  2. Interconnected: Identity can be communicated between entities in a standardized digital format.
  3. Flexible: Identity systems adapt to the nature of the transaction.

Both types of identity have their own benefits and problems, and depending on the situations many times we might require one, or another or even both of them.(World Economic Forum, 2016)

The actual situation

Nowadays people are subject to be found easily over the internet, especially when they work for a company, as a teacher in a school, as a doctor, as a researcher or if they use social media, that means almost everyone can be found on internet within a few clicks. This opens a lot possibilities and problems at the same time.

Talking of benefits

  • Many companies use the internet to find people that are suitable for a job.
  • It allows many transactions being more efficiently and quicker that to attend to a certain place.
  • It helps us to contact people almost at any time.

The controversy

  • It seems usual to hear about photos being stolen or personal information being used for something without an authorization that it makes people feel unsafe by using internet or giving the data to the companies. “Along with use of personal data, the concerns of people have also grown. The majority of individuals have concerns about the use of personal data by companies.” (Boston Consulting Group, 2012).  BCG ‘s representative survey of more than 3,000 European consumers revealed that 88% of people who are online consider at least one industry or sector a threat to their privacy.
  • Sometimes internet is used to ruin others identity and may have a very negative impact in his future social life.
  • Some people think that internet relationships are different to face to face ones in the way that some values don’t apply, this causes a lot of problems.

Brief conclusion

The use of technology can help us to relate with other people easily, it opens the door to a lot of possibilities and opportunities speaking of the areas of economics, social and education. We should use the internet considering that the values and respect we have in “real life “also apply on our online relations and consider that every action can have a bigger consequence that if done face to face because it stays for longer and is easy to be seen by all.

References and readings

Boston Consulting Group. (2012, November). The Value of Our Digital Identity. Retrieved September 26, 2016, from http://www.libertyglobal.com/PDF/public-policy/The-Value-of-Our-Digital-Identity.pdf

World Economic Forum. (2016). A Blueprint for Digital Identity. Retrieved September 26, 2016, from http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_A_Blueprint_for_Digital_Identity.pdf