Our data is already accessible to the government once we use the internet. Everything we do online is being monitored, and this limits our level of privacy. One good thing about having our data online is connectivity. With our data online, we can connect with old and new friends. A good example is Facebook, where we notice how this medium connects us with lots of friends.
Apart from connection, it helps financial bodies know where to improve and satisfy their customers. If these institutions don't monitor online communications their customers have with fraudsters and try to stop potential threats that could cause their customer loss of funds. With the lots of information fraudsters have gathered, losses would have been something that can't be controlled.
One disadvantage of having our data online is the lack of privacy. Making our data accessible is what leads to the cybercrime we experience on a daily basis. Many even go as far as creating scam sites just to gather people's data for malicious purposes.
Another downside of having our data online is misuse of people's data. Many cyber literates collect people's data just to sell these data to companies who in turn will use them to show adverts. Also, people use others' data to steal from us.
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Like what we experience on daily social media platforms where accounts are hacked, and the hacker uses others' identities to commit cyber crimes, thus tarnishing the image of the account owner. This reminds me of when one of my younger brother's accounts was hacked. It was his Facebook account, this hacker got all the information he had there. He searched the relationship column and got the names of everyone he listed as his siblings.
He visited these profiles and saw the connection between us and he got one of his pictures and wrote an obituary message and published it on his timeline. Then got our contact from our profile and started calling our numbers one after the other telling us how my brother had an accident. He lies about how the mortuary attendants refused to take him in because no deposit had been made.
This man made this news so real that we got scared and wondered if that was how we would just lose our sibling. We tried reaching him and his number wasn't going through which made his story sound true to us. We kept trying and at last we got to talk to him on the phone and that was when he told us that he had seen the message too that his account was hacked. When our data gets to the wrong people, they can use it to steal and harm us. Imagine we had sent that money to him, he would have sat home smiling at how we believed and bought his story.
One way we can safeguard our data and make it private is simply by minding the links we click. There are so many people who click links seeking for greener pastures. It's always nice to click links only when we are certain these links are reliable and from the right sources. We know that the government watching what we do on the internet helps in the control of crimes. It is necessary for the government to be fair in their watchdog activities.