When you have something important, you make efforts to keep it safe. You wouldn’t leave your credit card out on a bench and walk away, or leave your house keys at the mall with your address attached. Sounds far fetched but it’s essentially what we are doing with personal information every day. Your online data, from what you enter to
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Every handheld device knows where it is, pinpointed via cell towers, WiFi, and connected apps. This used to be called Global Positioning Service (GPS) and was primary used to identify your location on a map on your device. Today it is referred to as Geolocation, or Location Based Services (LBS). This location data is now sent from your device to other services so
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It may sound complicated but Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) is not only simple, it is becoming necessary in an increasingly digital world. What is it? To log in to to any digital platform, you are required to provide something to identify yourself as the owner of the account. Usually this consists of a unique identifier such as a username (or email
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It’s all fun and games online until you run in to a jerk, or in internet slang, a troll. Trolls are people who put up abusive or inflammatory posts with the intention of upsetting others or starting arguments. We can also expand the definition to include people that impersonate someone else online or post inappropriate content. Though the term “troll”
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Every time you go online you add to your digital footprint, or binary tattoo. The information collected is made up of what you enter online (likes, comments, posts), your behaviour (what sites you visit, how you interact with them) and what inferences companies can make based on the first two pieces of data. This data is used to target ads and make marketing decisions.
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If you are like me, you have more online accounts and passwords than you can possibly remember. Every website seems to require a login. When you find yourself needing to sign up for the 59th time, it can be quite exhilarating to be offered the ability to sign on using Facebook, LinkedIn or another network you already have. This seems perfect!
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Time for everyone to weigh in on trends for the year. If there is one thing I have learned in this business, it’s that predicting the internet is like predicting the weather: You can use as many resources as you want to but you can only glimpse a fraction of the future, and once in a while you get hit by a
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When you look at online use statistics, you’ll see that kids under 18 are the best trend setters. The 18-34 age group are the most prevalent users. But the fastest growing demographic? Seniors, age 65 and up. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The internet offers the same benefits to seniors as to the young: connections with people, ability to do things
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It has been over a year since Edward Snowden outed the NSA for secretly spying on people using their digital data. This was a real eye-opener to the public, who once assumed much of their online information was safe. When we consider how much we do online these days (banking, bills, shopping, social networks), it is scary to think any
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It probably won’t surprise you to know that I do most of my research online. Sure, I have a mini-library of actual books on big data, privacy and parenting ‘in the digital age’, but all the latest and greatest info needs to be sought in real-time. Thing is, I am not alone. Many people, especially kids, use the internet for
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