Digital literacy 4: Watch your back!

I'm always asking myself the question - what do my students need to know to be able to use the web effectively? One of the important skills I identified in a previous post on digital literacies is how people manage and protect their privacy. This is aligned to e-safety, which is about protecting people online. Indeed, each of us is vulnerable because there is a huge potential for our privacy to be breached in any online environment. You would certainly be very angry if someone came snooping around your house and rifled through your personal belongings, wouldn't you? And yet many of us can be careless about the way we handle our personal data when we go online. And the extent to which many of us are now electronically connected to others is astounding.

This begs the question - can any of us protect our privacy on the web? Social media seem increasingly pervasive, and many millions of people put up details of their private lives every day - contact details, personal photographs, dates of birth etc - details they would never dream of giving to a stranger. Oh look, there's someone I haven't met before. Hellooo. I'm going to go up to them and give them my phone number and address, some photos of me on holiday in my swimwear, a list of my best friends and my date of birth! Oh, and they can have my credit card details too while I'm at it! Would anyone do that, even if they were very extremely attracted? It would be bizarre behaviour. And yet people do exactly that every day online. I'm amazed at the photos some students put up on social network sites. It's not just pictures of them falling out of a pub at 3 o'clock in the morning, it may also be pics of their friends too. With their permission or not? I wonder if they will still be happy about those photos in a few year's time when they apply for a job, and their potential employer Googles them to see who they are.

For me it's all a matter of choice. How many of your personal details you make available on the web is really up to you. Your privacy settings may help you to protect stuff. but even if you know how to choose the correct settings (and many students don't) how can you be really certain that your content is fully protected from prying eyes? Posting up your home address and telephone number, and then posting in your timeline that you are going on holiday next week, might be asking for trouble. How do you know who has access to your timeline? How do you know how many people read your Twitter feed or your updates?

You also leave a trail behind you wherever you go on the Internet. Google and other search engines maintain a record of all the sites you visit during your time online. Many sites send cookies to your pc when you enter them. Some of these can be malicious, allowing other people to gain access to your pc memory, and if spyware has been used, to also record your keystrokes when you pay for something on Amazon using your credit card. Although it's still quite rare for this to happen, this kind of criminal activity is on the increase, and without appropriate Internet Security software, you run the risk of being one of the victims. Have you thought about the amount of personal detail you hold about yourself and your friends on your mobile phone? If you use public wifi networks or open your mobile to bluetooth connectivity, you may also be opening up the entire content of your mobile for intruders to capture and use. This useful report from the BBC Click team reveals that although malware for mobile phones is on the increase, it is still simple user naivety that is responsible for the majority of problems of this kind.

For me, raising the awareness of students and other web users to the dangers of the Internet will always include the problem of maintaining privacy. The golden rules are: Be careful what sites you visit (your security software should alert you to any unsafe sites), be careful what you post up online that may have personal information in it (this is just common sense) and watch your back - protect your identity, because you never know who may be looking over your shoulder. On Monday: Managing digital identities.

Watch your back by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.