Privacy Are We Giving It Away?
Identity theft, misuse of personal information the age of the internet is fraught with questions of privacy. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Belinger: We should be concerned as citizens about our breaches to our information because it happens in all kinds of organizations from banks to retail organizations, to service organizations; even to universities and government.
France Belinger is a professor in accounting and information systems in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.
Belinger: So hackers get into their systems and collect information about us. And so then they can use that for identity theft or other issues, such as even blackmailing individuals.
Identity theft isn’t the only privacy issue. Every day, we’re unknowingly giving away personal information to corporations and service organizations.
Belinger: People take pictures all the time on their mobile phones. A lot of individuals do not know that when you take a picture the information includes geo-tagging, which means the location and time where the picture was taken. Sounless they specifically turn off a setting on their mobile phone, that information is attached to each picture.
Then they post their pictures on various sites: social media,Instagram, whatever. And then people who know how to do this can access this information. You can track where people are, when they are there, just by people giving that information voluntarily, most often because they do not know.
To turn geo-tagging information off your phone, you go to the privacy settings on your phone, and you just turn it off — one switch, one button and it’s off. And then you don’t actually release this information.
We’ll hear more about wireless privacy in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.