Communications and Security

Technology has completely overhauled communication methods in the past century.  Snail mail which took days turned into Email which takes seconds.  Telephone calls have turned into video conferences.  One of the leading components to the change in communication was the advancements in social media cites as well as email clients.   New technologies continue to make the means of communicating easier and more convenient for users, but there is a risk that comes with them.  It is important to recognize the advancements in communication that are provided by these new tools but to also understand how to properly use them.

One of the conveniences of computers is the ability for a website to remember a user’s login information.  It accomplishes this by the use of a tracking cookie.  Tracking cookies are given by a website and stored on a local machine and detected by the HTML of a website when you revisit it.  Being remembered across multiple websites is an incredible convenience, but it is also a real risk.  If someone gains access to your computer, they now have access to all of the websites that you are permanently remembered on.  Access to your personal social media website where they can learn private information about you or your friends can be very dangerous.  Even worse if your email is always logged in, someone could access your email and get all types of sensitive information.  The best solution is to not take the easy way and sign in each time.  Most websites offer the ability to remember the users name, without the password .  This is a much safer solution.  As with most things in life, in order to be safe one must make some sacrifices such as convenience of automatically logging into a website.