Potential Threats In The Internet

The internet is full of potential threats to us and contains a lot of various information of each users and many people often don’t like the informations to leaked so in order to hide their real identity and away from significant threat in the internet world they create dummy accounts. According to Suler (2002) The rise of social networking sites further complicates the way people manage their image online. Everyone has numerous roles in life, such as parent, friend, and co-worker. People are now able to manage their images online to reflect the multiple facets of selves. These phenomena have made people feel increasingly worried or threatened, and some who have unintentionally revealed personal information have experienced emotional or tangible damage (Woodruff, 2014; Kang, 2013; Shay 2014). Moreover, numerous accidents happened in social networking and that leads to people concern about showing too much information on social medias. People’s own activities on social media, if revealed in unintended ways, can endanger their social relationships (Litt et al, 2014).

In today’s Internet is becoming a massive threat to each individual if information is leaked. We have this called privacy Westin (1967) defines: “Privacy is the claim of individuals, groups or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” Interviewees seek for anonymity were influenced by the things they want do without people knowing too much info about them and manage some boundaries in real life and online. Also, to avoid conflict to other individual. Their reason for seeking anonymity range widely some want to protect their personal information, away from hackers or goverments, protect their family, to avoid unpleasant gossip in the internet and etc. The Internet now becomes the grand stage for self-presentation shared by everyone. An early piece of research examined how home pages reveal about ones’ identity, and found people not only used factual descriptions, but also depicted fictional personas on their home pages (Walker, 2000). Bargh and colleagues argue that Internet can be a place to express people’s alternative personas such as the ideal self, future self, or potential self.

Their experiments showed that people were more likely to express their true self over the Internet versus face to face, and were also more likely to project an ideal friend image to the partner they met over the Internet but not the one they met face to face. Besides people’s username, the picture on their home page or their avatar in an online community, Suler (2002) proposes that even the communication channels people choose can reflect their identity. The authors argue that this is because the perceived risk associated with advertising is more salient. Ur et al (2012)’s study shows that more than half of their interviewees are aware that the ads they see online are personalized, and people perceive OBA as both “useful and privacy invasive”, and they are “scared about being tracked and monitored”. People’s attitudes also depend on which company collects information – they are most concerned about unfamiliar companies but least concerned about familiar brands like Google. Leon et al (2013) found users’ willingness to disclose information for OBA varies significantly depending on information types (personal identifiable information are considered most sensitive), data-retention policies (more willing to disclose if data is only retained for one day), and the scope of data use. They also showed that giving user better control over their information increased their willingness to share.

Contrary to Ur et al (2012), their experiment shows that people’s opinions do not differ for well-known website versus unfamiliar website.To protect their information security and privacy y. Some work studies strategies for protecting computer security, such as using anti-virus technology and firewall, keeping email hygiene, avoiding phishing websites and using secure passwords (Wash 2010). In addition, their respondents also mentioned to limit the information to post online like their number, address, and full name. Boyd et al (2011) studied how teenagers use privacy settings on Facebook to prevent strangers from seeing their content. Both adults and teens use what they called “social tools” to manage different social boundaries, such as using different sites (Facebook and Myspace) to communicate with different connections, and switching communication channels (Facebook vs. text message).