An Uncertain Source: Why You Should Doubt the Internet

This semester my call to change is focused on changing the undeserved trust that people give to the internet. In my midterm video, I began by recapping a normal interaction on the internet; seeing a product, following a link to a website, reading reviews and then purchasing the project. While this seems normal and harmless, the fact is that the internet user just followed an unverified link to a website who’s reviews they blindly trusted and then gave very personal information, including a personal address and credit card number, to a company they have no real knowledge of. Basically the reckless way in which we approach the internet will come back to bite us if we don’t put measures in place to protect ourselves.

This topic originated from several sources, (and more writing on the topic can be found here, here, and here) the main one being that I myself use the internet. I’ve had experiences were I've believed “facts” that aren't true because of their professional design, or have trusted reviews on products that I've purchased and then found to be sub-par. The most eye opening experience I’ve had with internet safety however, is a lecture I attended for an Information systems class on password protection. I’d always obliviously followed the standard “six letters and two numbers” password pattern that is so common, believing that because my name was not in the password no one would physically guess it. However, when hacking into accounts people don’t sit at computers and type in guesses to a password, they use a program that inputs all of the alphanumeric combinations until the account is accessible. Needless to say, six letters and two numbers can be cracked very fast, while throwing in random capitals and symbols can increase the time it takes to get into an account exponentially. While a fact like this makes a lot of sense, it was never conveyed to me why passwords really should be more complicated until this lecture, and I realized that the blasé attitude and casual trust people exhibit out of inattention or ignorance towards the internet is really a problem.

While I’ve generally had good feedback with this problem, people tend to approach internet safety like they do eating vegetables; They know it’s very important, but generally ignore the whole concept or consume an inadequate amount and call themselves good. Throughout history, people hesitated to question authority because of fear of change (especially after the disaster of the French Revolution) but so much good can come out not blindly following tradition. For example, by challenging the superiority of the British Empire and the inherent need for a monarch, American colonists were able to create the United States of America. By challenging conventional transportation methods Henry Ford created the first commercialized automobile that revolutionized the way we travel. By challenging the inherent trust we place in the internet we can find a safer way to interact, and possible make those interactions better in the process. The biggest historical connection to the development of the internet has to be the printing press. By allowing a wider number of people access to the written word, the printing press sped up the process of decimating information, lead to the mass publishing of books and newspapers. The internet is basically the same concept, but on steroids and with a wider reach. Anyone can spread information, and with social media people sometimes make careers of sharing their lives with others. With facebook and twitter we no longer need written journals to spread our ideas or lives to progeny, that information is already all online, with pictures and comments by our friends included. The internet in and of itself is a vehicle for communication, but we often treat what we learn from it as a peer reviewed paper instead of the opinion piece that it often is (take Wikipedia for example- everyone knows that it is crowd source and any of the information could be false, but we trust it anyway) and we need to treat the internet as the tool it really is, not the authority we see it as.  

Update:
It's probably not possible to eradicate the issues that come with something as user-produced as the internet, but by watching what we click, consumer or give away, we can make a safer environment for ourselves. There are many jokes in pop culture about internet scams people fall prey too, such as emails from Nigerian princes or the dangers of cat fishing, but many people have also managed to avoid these scam because they were made common knowledge; everything else on the internet is crowd sourced, it would make sense to spread information we uncover about tricks and scams also. While it wouldn't solve the problem it would help to mitigate the negative consequences of people being shady on the internet. Also, the printing press is an example of how fast information can spread on a new medium, like how information spreads quickly with the internet.