Is the internet dangerous?

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

The wandering plot of online literature: She meets Him online, has a whirlwind virtual romance, and when it comes to meeting, the invisible interlocutor turns out to be her boss, her neighbor in the staircase, or even her own husband. This turn of events seems incredible only at the beginning. The more often you surf the web, the more likely you are to stumble upon people you know.

On the Internet, quite unexpectedly, you can find a story about your boss's vacation, a nude photo of a classmate, a neighbor's diary in the stairwell (in which you can find out a lot of interesting things about yourself), a photo report about your ex's wedding and messages on the forum from your current one. How does this threaten you? Yes, practically nothing. But only as long as you act as an anonymous viewer and do not start to "follow" on the forums, do not start a virtual diary or your own home page, on which you post the latest news about yourself and fresh photos from the dacha, do not become a regular visitor to the chats in which you will share the sore one with the first interlocutor you come across. Then you yourself will turn into someone's classmate, someone's work colleague, someone's neighbor, someone's former and someone's real. And then you will already give people the information that in your right mind and under torture would not have said. It only seems that the Internet is huge and it is unrealistic to meet someone you know. His seeming anonymity is just a myth. It is actually small. How cramped it is. What does this threaten you with? so is the internet dangerous and how to protect yourself?

Danger # 1 - no secrets

Leaving information here and there bit by bit, you yourself will not notice how you surrender yourself with all the giblets. For example, you actively hang out on one of the women's forums, bring all your problems, all your joys and sorrows, dreams and desires there. Gradually, you become more and more open, open the veil over your personal life, in passing mention your place of work, talk about your favorite books and movies, discuss what qualities you value in men above all … As a result, if you collect all your messages together (and this is a standard forum function "read all user messages"), you can easily find out how old you are, whether you have a boyfriend, what you eat for breakfast, what color underwear you bought at the last sale in "Mega", in which coffee shop you discuss the latest gossip with girlfriends and what color lipstick you put on your lips today.

What of this? Quite harmless information, you say. This one is. And if you dig around properly, you can find out when you leave for work and come back, what brand you work at the monitor, without getting up from the sofa, what shops you visit and what jewelry you wear. Already on this you can get an idea of your material wealth. And if you, out of your own carelessness, leave your home phone number to one of your new friends on the network, then you can not be surprised if, after returning from work, you find neither a brand new laptop, nor a flat TV, nor your favorite gold pendant with diamonds. Do you think I'm scaring you? Six months ago, I thought that forums and chats are an ideal area for fraud, and already a couple of weeks ago, my assumptions were confirmed by a newspaper article in the crime chronicle section.

A certain ardently in love and naive Russian woman suffered at the hands of her virtual lover from Sweden. She found his photo on a dating site, began a correspondence. The groom swore his love, talked to her for hours on the phone, regardless of the payment for international negotiations, burned with impatience and finally announced that he was arriving in Moscow. The potential bride rushed to the airport to meet him. She never saw the handsome Swede, but when she returned home, she found that guests had visited her house … Later she found out that the photo shows one of the little-known English actors, and a good half of Russian sites are generously hung with the profiles of the loving "Swede" dating.

Danger # 2 - no prohibitions

Continuing the conversation on the topic: is the internet dangerous? Your chatter on the Internet can be a bait for both the robber and the gigolo who is looking for another victim, because in his hands is a complete dossier indicating your habits and preferences. Do you remember how dishonest gentlemen in movies found out any little things about her from the girlfriends of the girl they liked in order to carefully calculate the seduction plan? So the Internet dossier in this regard is much more insidious - after all, your friends may not even guess about the details that you report about yourself! Here you have a photo, a name, an approximate address, and all personal information, not to mention a soul turned inside out in front of virtual interlocutors.

And if you collect in a heap all the traces of your presence in the network? Home page, favorite forum, beloved chat, virtual diary, stories on Cleo.ru? After all, you generously share with the surrounding links to these pages, or even indicate them in your profile. Now imagine: how many interesting things your new virtual acquaintance will learn about you (who knows, maybe this is your lost half?) After spending a few hours on the Internet. Are you sure he will like what he sees and reads?

Danger # 3 - you will recognize it from a thousand

If you, burning with curiosity, read the revelations of your former classmate in the About this forum (how did you recognize her? Yes, there is a picture of her in her profile, and she has not changed at all since school!), This does not mean that you are the only one smart and resourceful. Who can guarantee that at that moment your ex-boyfriend Max or your colleague Olya did not crouch down to the monitors and do not read the entry in your LJ that tells that this same Max is a complete insignificance, and Olya is an upstart, which the world has never seen? With Max it is still clear: with him you will no longer have children and you will not take your grandchildren to the zoo. But with Olga still work and work, communicate and communicate - well, who pulled you by the tongue? And who would have thought that Olya, by some miracle, would find out the link to your diary, known only to her closest friends? Well, this is a good lesson for the future. Your diary will not become poorer if you do not write, "What a bitch, this Olka", but Olka may well be angry from such a careless entry and will pretty much spoil your life in the team.

To go far for examples: I myself have become a victim of recognition. When Cleo published my first article about the pros and cons of living in the provinces, I had just moved from noisy Moscow to quiet Irkutsk. The article was a lively response to the changes in my life. But who would have thought that "Cleo" is read by my new boss and hundreds of employees at the plant where my husband works? For some reason, they all saw only disadvantages in the article. The boss, who has become a friend, still teases me with a tyramissa. And for a long time my husband had to listen to sympathetic comments from female colleagues: "Probably, it is very difficult for your wife to get used to the city, right?" From that moment on, I took a pseudonym and no longer dared to publish articles under my real name.

After we tried to figure it out is the internet dangerous in fact, it can be concluded. So what now - to enroll in partisans, see ICQ as a spy in every visitor and share experiences only on paper, and then hide it in a turnkey table? Of course no! It's just that every frankness should have its own boundaries. The Internet is liberating. The "companion effect" is triggered. In the chat it seems to you that you will never meet this person again, and you spread to him everything that you do not admit to your loved one. In the forum - that you are separated by thousands of kilometers and a million urgent matters, that acquaintance will never grow into life. In ICQ - that there are 9 million people in your city and the likelihood of meeting a friend is negligible. But every netizen is a real person, and every message you leave can be read by several thousand visitors. Any of them may turn out to be your acquaintances, and for insignificant details that will not say anything to a thousand users, one and only one can expose your disguise in one moment. But every day there are more and more network visitors, and therefore the chances of meeting with friends are growing. Be careful! And remember that every woman must have a mystery. So do not reveal all the cards to the end in front of virtual interlocutors!

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