If your family is traveling this summer and wants to blog or check email in Internet cafes, you’ll need to be careful about logging into your Web accounts like Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo Mail. Public computers can easily have malicious keylogger software on them that logs your every keystroke (such as passwords and other account info). The workaround is simple, though. Take a great tip the … [Read more...] about Be smart about cybercafes
Privacy
Stalking: New fact of life?
“Stalking” isn’t necessarily as bad as it sounds. Say you’re single and someone lines up a blind date for you. You’d want to find out a little about him, right? So you “stalk him,” as the digital natives put it. To many social networkers, it’s a fun, innocuous sort of “background check,” to see who a person’s friends are, where her tastes lie, what she talks about, etc., and definitely what she … [Read more...] about Stalking: New fact of life?
‘Growing up in public’
Interest in youth’s limited interest in privacy (except where parents are concerned) is growing, and commentaries are multiplying. “The future belongs to the uninhibited,” suggested New York magazine (see this in NetFamilyNews). Across the pond, The Telegraph reported that, for today’s online youth, closeness, intimacy, the sharing of secrets is distributed rather than individual and private (see … [Read more...] about ‘Growing up in public’
Overexposed on the social Web
Photos of and lewd comments about high school track star Allison Stokke, 18, are “plastered across the Internet,” the Washington Post reports, and this week newspapers and blogs nationwide have covered this social-Web phenomenon (a Google News search Wednesday turned up about two dozen newspaper stories). This is all unwanted attention for Allison. “After dinner one evening in mid-May, Stokke … [Read more...] about Overexposed on the social Web
Non-private pasts
In a commentary in The Observer, a media company chief creative officer talks about how young users of “the confessional media” will never be able to “take it back” the way today’s politicians, celebrities, and other grownups can. “The bulk of them use their MySpace and Facebook entries for self-advertisement, social networking and the generally raw process of growing up and working out their … [Read more...] about Non-private pasts