A New Age of Digital Interconnection

Today, everything, and everyone is digital. From the young teens all having the newest smartphone, to just about everything (including refrigerators and baby monitors…) being connected in the IOT (internet of things), technology is ruling our lives and connecting it and every little way.

The IOT

The IOT alone is a vast network connecting various devices to the internet (often which don’t need to be). Most of heard of the IOT even if they don’t know the name for it. Such as most will know Google’s Home series or Amazon’s Alexa, but not know about baby monitors. Mostly these devices and “things” work as they should, and no issues arise, but when the problems do it can be catastrophic. These devices can fall victim to many different attacks. A prominent example of this is the Mirai botnet which infected these IoT devices and used all of them for DDOS attacks. Another example includes Google Dorking. Now my advice is to not rid yourself of every IoT device out there, but the rethink being “that” connected.

Social Media

Another issue in today’s age is social media. While social media has plenty of benefits, it definitely has drawbacks. The good news is, that most of these drawbacks can be fixed relatively easy. The drawbacks, for the most part, include an over sharing of information. This information can be used against you in the wrong hands. Such as spear phishing attacks or to impersonate you. While many people think nothing of sharing a geotagged enabled photo of them and all their friends (who are also tagged in the photo) out for lunch, it's best to reconsider. My advice for keeping private info private include:

• Turn off geotagging
• Try to keep the information shared minimalistic
• Only add people you know in person
• Review privacy settings
• Try sharing stuff more directly (sending emails, texts, messages) to the people you want to share with
• While I know it seems restrictive and many won’t do all of these. It makes sense to at least try a couple. Yes, social media is about being interconnected and sharing, maybe it’s time to rethink its purpose in our lives.

This article is about interconnection, while IoT devices connect with the internet and social media connects us with other people, do the two interact with each other? Well, kind of. Often, they do not interact directly, although you can update social media through IoT devices I believe. However, the way they interact is subtler. This is where privacy becomes a factor again. Companies use all this IOT data about you and your likes to tailor content to you. They can use all this data to maximize their own choices to help them succeed, like which demographic is interested in this. So far it sounds ok, however bad things can occur. Like, how do we make sure that only the data we want shared and used is the only data being collected? Or how safe is our data being kept? These issues are ones which the answers are not easy to get and sometimes scary how much is being kept on us. For the brave ones who use Facebook, or Google, I recommend downloading the data they have on you and seeing if you’re okay with that.

Conclusion

In the end, there are plenty of things you can do to secure your interconnected life. But beyond my tips, I advise you to look at these issues deeper, like Facebooks data breach. Based on this, you can decide better more personalized tips for yourself. These are general solutions. To everyone who read this, thank you, and keep being digitally safe.