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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Useful things for young people aged 14 and over

21 August 2015

Take this moment to consider the five laws of your life online. Like laws of the state, whether or not you choose to learn these laws is irrelevant, as you will be tried by them regardless.

1.
Assume everything you do and say will be made public.

2.
Do not be seduced by privacy settings and passwords, which are temporary illusions that distract from the reality of the previous point.

3.
Understand that context and data are often one and the same. When you enter information on the internet, assume that you include the who (you), the what (the data), the when (the time of data input), the where (the site on which the data is being placed), the how (the device on which you input the data), and the why (the purpose of the site).

4.
Believe that all of your credit card transactions are being kept in a colossal, searchable ledger that one day will be made available for all to study.

5.
Believe that data does not disappear when you delete it.

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18 August 2015

Being able to maintain your privacy on the Internet is becoming harder, but it’s never been more important.

Here are seven ways you can protect your personal information and privacy online

 

Read more here

26 May 2015

How does Facebook know who your friends are? It's a mystery that has nagged users since at least 2011, when the Irish Data Protection Commissioner conducted a full-scale investigation into the issue. But four years later, there's still a lot of confusion and misinformation about what Facebook's doing when it "finds" your friends.

Did it scrape your phone for names and numbers? Run a reverse-image search of your picture? Compile a "shadow" or "ghost" profile on you over a period of years, just waiting for you to log on and "confirm" its guesses?

Alas, Facebook's actual process isn't actually that sneaky or malicious. In fact, it involves this pretty complex academic field called ... network science.

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21 May 2015

The UK Safer Internet Centre have now produced and published three brand new checklists – for Twitter, Snapchat & Instagram, with the same style and format as their hugely popular Facebook checklist. (via Kent esafety)

Read more at Kent Esafety.

29 April 2015

Why are people so mean on the Internet? It's a question we have been trying to answer for more than a decade, but the matter seems to be reaching a cultural boiling point.

 

Read the New York Times article here