The Information Age: Civil Rights

The information age has bought many things to the world we live in today and certain things that have been created take up a huge chunk of our lives. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, is said to be what takes up a lot of our time and the social networks account for 20% of the time spent online by all users of the internet with Facebook owning 95% of the time spent on the social networking sites.

With the use of Facebook and Twitter forever increasing, the amount of things people publish on these social networking sites increases also, whether it be writing about their new favourite television programme or about their latest love affair, it all goes on the internet for all to see. Everything that has been published on these sites can be viewed by any of your friends at any time of the day, and if you have your boss or a work colleague as a friend on these types of sites you have to be careful what you write. A young 16-year-old girl, Kimberley Swann, started letting off steam and began to tell her friends of Facebook of how ‘boring and dull’ her new job was, a few days later, while at work she was called into the office and told that her boss has seen her comments on Facebook and, even though the name of the company was never revealed over the social networking site, that the boss didn’t want to see the company in the eye of the world. The company later revealed that the reason her job was terminated with immediate effect was the fact that the comments on Facebook showed that Kimberley was not happy with and didn’t enjoy her job.

This shows the power of social networking sites like Facebook, and how what you write on these sites can affect your personal life.

Another story that caught my eye was a story about a Swiss woman who lost her job after her employers spotted she was using the Facebook website when she had earlier called in to her work place claiming that she was too ‘ill’ to go into work as her job involved using a computer and it would strain her eyes, she would be unable to do her job properly as she was suffering from a migraine and instead of going into work she needed to stay home and lie in a darkened room. The company said its discovery that she was not suffering as much as she made out as she was able to use the social networking site and by doing this she lost the trust of the company. After being dismissed from her duties, the Swiss woman told of how she had been accessing the social network through the Internet on her smart phone while laying in a dark room while in bed, she also spoke of how she was “disgusted” as she couldn’t believe that the company had created a facebook account of a fictional personnel which became “friends” with the woman, which in turn allowed the company to monitor the online activity at any time of the day, she claimed that after her dismissal the “Facebook friend” suddenly disappeared from her personal Facebook page.

As you can properly tell, these two stories are not the first and, all the time people publish their views to the world wide web, by all means will not be the last time that people lose jobs due to things on the Internet. This questions the civil rights and how people cannot have a private life without it affecting the way in which people value and respect them. Without the information age people wouldn’t be able to write about how “boring and dull” their job is online and then would have no risk of losing their job over something like this.

One of the biggest stories in the United Kingdom in 2011 was easily the London Riots, riots that were prompted by the killing of a man by a police officer, which spiralled out of control and turned into building being burned down and “hoodies” and others looting many shops in and around the country’s capital city. There was a lot of publicity over this huge event and there was much talk of the riots being organised on social networking sites and private messaging services like BlackBerry Messenger, more commonly known as BBM. There were rumours all over the Internet that the messaging service was used to conduct a plan causing the riots as the police were unable to see the messages being sent, as the police do not have the privilege of being able to read all of the message sent from BlackBerry to BlackBerry. During and after the riots people were posting, or “tweeting” on Twitter of how pictures were being released on BBM, the media were then able to get hold of the images as they were being put on Twitter. This once again questions the personal rights of any human being, the fact that the media are able to take personal photos, even if they are seen to be showing actions that are considered bad.

Online Crime and The Information Age

There are many crimes that are committed through the Internet, many of which are committed to make money. With the Internet growing rapidly, so is the rate of crime over the Internet with a whole host of methods that are used by the criminals to steal identities and money.

Computer crime is generally committed by criminals in order to either:

·      Steal money

·      Steal data or information

·      Steal someone’s identity

·      Damage or disrupt someone’s system for revenge

·      Cause general havoc for fun

·      Copy software, films, and music to avoid having to pay for it.

The theft of money is probably the biggest and most common type of Internet crime due to the growth of commerce that is now done through the Internet with the use of credit and debit cards. Theives are able to obtain the credit card details when people use their credit or debit cards on an unsecure website or by sending out emails to large numbers of email addresses ‘phishing’ for the customer to send back their personal information including their credit and debit card details. ‘Phishing’ literally means “way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication”.

Theft of data is another common type of Internet crime especially stealing data from big online companies like PayPal and eBay. Data is considered to be one of the most valuable thing a business can hold about customers or about any type of stakeholder the business has, whether it be shareholders or supplier all the data they posses is very important and if it is lost then it can cause various consequences. A consequence could be something as big as having the press print bad publicity about the business in a worldwide newspaper causing the business to lose a lot of respect that they may or many not have built up. Another consequence that may lead to losing customers threw not providing a good service is due to losing data the business would have to gather the information again which would take time, which could cause products or services would be delivered late and could then lead to cash flow problems.

Phishing is one of the biggest types of fraud that is committed over the Internet but there are other types of fraud that are committed. Criminals go through long processes to try and make you hand over your bank account details, generally when a phishing email is sent, it has a link attached to the email that will direct you to a website, a website that will look exactly the same as your bank’s website, before you are able to do anything you will be asked to enter your log on details and once you have done this your log in credentials will be sent to the fraudster who will then be able to find out all of your personal information and bank details to steal money from your accounts. Another way in which criminal commit fraud over the Internet is by guaranteeing customers a ‘get rich quick’ scheme if you pay a large sum of money for a pack containing all the information you would need to succeed in something like this, this type of online crime seems to be generally aimed at elderly people by the fraudsters as they think they would be more liable to buy the fake product.

Cyber bullying is another crime that is committed a lot in today’s society, especially with the introduction of many social networks that bring friends or enemies together on the Internet. With the social networks forever growing and hundreds of new users registering with the social networks daily, the amount of times this type of crime is committed increases as well.

With the information age growing rapidly, so is the ways in which online crime and other types of crime are prevented. One of the biggest changes that the information age has bought to the crime is dealt with, is the use of databases. The police are able to keep a record of any previous convictions of every human being in the country on a computer hard drive, by having it on the computer it reduces the amount of time it takes for the police to search for the person’s record, this helps when taking mandatory checks of teacher’s and people who work with children’s records.

The information age has introduced the invention of CCTV and security cameras and these two things are now massively important to the police and the way the investigate crimes. CCTV, otherwise known as closed circuit television, means the use cameras that capture video footage to transmit to a signal to a specific place on a set of monitors. They were first installed in 1994 after experiments were done in the UK many years before and were deemed successful, at first the video cameras were generally used in areas that need monitoring as crime is very prominent in a specific area, places such as banks, night clubs/pubs, casinos, airports, and convenience stores, as they were thought to be very successful to be helping the police solve crimes better than ever before, the systems were later to be installed to cover most city centres over the UK, many train and bus stations, car-parks and estates.

Another piece of high technological equipment that has helped the police in preventing crime is the introduction of security tags in retail stores and other places. The security tags are attached to all products in the store and when the customers purchase an item the employee would remove the tag as if the tag were not removed then when the customer leaves the shop, an alarm would sound, as sensors will have sensed that there are tags on the product. This helps prevent theft from retail stores as if a thief runs out of the store with an item with a tag on it, the alarm will sound alerting employees and other members of the public that something is being stolen. Another feature to the security tags is that even if the product is stolen then there is now ‘inked security tags’ which, when removed, spills ink over the product leaving it either broken or unable to use, this ink cannot be washed out either.

Overall, prevention of crime has become much easier with the introduction of pieces of advanced technology including such things as security tags and CCTV hardware.