talkingDigital

Do you know the difference between the internet and the World Wide Web? Many people don’t.

READ COLUMN AS IT APPEARED IN THE BEACON

The internet is the massive network of computers that allows you to use email, send pictures via your phone, and see who’s at the door from all the way across town, using that new video doorbell you keep seeing on the home shopping channel.

The World Wide Web is the collection of websites that you access by typing an address into the web browser of your device.

It’s acceptable to say, “I went on the internet to find out if giraffes can see in color.” But it’s more accurate to say that you did your research on the web.

Everything you do on the web is done via the internet, but not everything on the internet is done using the web.

Where does social media fit in?

Sometimes you’ll hear the argument that social media is the new World Wide Web, suggesting that Facebook is the preferred channel for information. Rather than visiting www.beaconseniornews.com to read the news, for example, many people simply follow the BEACON Senior Newspaper on Facebook and let the news come to them. This is a totally acceptable way to get the news, but you don’t want to use social media as your only source for gathering information online.

Don’t limit yourself

The biggest downside of using social media sites exclusively is that they only show you what they think you should see. If you follow The BEACON on Facebook, you won’t get all of the paper’s updates. You’ll only see updates that Facebook thinks you will interact with.

It’s also important to remember that there are great sources for news, information and shopping that you’ll never find if you don’t go directly to sites like news.google.com or www.cnn.com.

But there are some things social media does better by design than the web ever could.

Social media’s advantages

If you lose a pet and don’t post about it on a Facebook page designed to help find lost animals in your area, you miss out on the best possibility of reuniting with your furry friend.

The reason it’s so effective is because when you post your lost pet update, everyone in the group shares the post on their own Facebook pages, connecting with their friends. Suddenly you have a whole network of pet sleuths helping you.

Social media is also becoming the best place to sell your used items. Unlike sites like Craigslist, Facebook shows you the first and last name—and usually the face—of the person with whom you are dealing. It’s also becoming the best place on the web for job searches, business recommendations and even product reviews.

So the next time you hear someone say, “I don’t use social media because I don’t want to see what my friends ate for lunch,” explain to them that social media has as many practical uses—like videos of cats getting scared by cucumbers.

An example of a container for geocaching game, Czech Republic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Instead of reading news articles about Pokemon Go, I decided to download it myself.

Murder of Adam Walsh (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

5. Substantiated myths can reach mythical proportions. Yes, someone found a body while playing Pokemon Go. Also, some people were using the locations to stock victims to mug. Also, there was a kid once named Adam Walsh who was kidnapped from a Sears once and the entire country stopped letting their kids peruse the in the toy aisle by themselves for almost 20 years. There was also once a kid who got hit by a car while riding his bike. And this one time a kid went to school and got bullied by a teacher ever day.

Related articles

• ‘Pokémon Go’ is Where I Draw the Line on “Augmented Reality”
• Can Facebook recommend friends just on you phone’s GPS?

Privacy is a major concern these days because so much of who you are is now kept in digital form, and then spread all over the world because of internet access. So even though so much more is convenient and available for you, without the right security measures, all of that information is available to other people as well who get access.

So, a big solution to that problem is to make sure that your digital presence is encrypted as much as possible, and you can do that by encrypting your email, your passwords, your financial data, your phone messages, and by protecting your mobile data as well.

Encrypting Your Email

Though most people don’t think that a majority of their email is any kind of a security risk, there are still times when you communicate when privacy is necessary. Sending medical data, financial data, or even relationship talk doesn’t always need to be publicly searchable or readable. So, to that end, consider using an e-mail encryption program that does the hard work for you, without you even having to think about it, so that all of that information is sent entirely privately.

Encrypting Your Passwords

Passwords are the keys to your most personal and most important data, so it’s no surprise that the best password managers are the ones that encrypt those passwords locally so that, even though you only need your one master password, the rest of them are safely locked away in a format that hackers can’t get to. That is one of the best safety features that you can put in place on your home computers.

Encrypting Your Financial Data

Most of your financial data is going to be encrypted by your banks and credit card companies automatically. Since the very beginning of internet technology, financial institutions realized how important that kind of safety was, so they have been using military-grade encryption practices pretty much since people started being able to use electronic banking.

Encrypting Your Phone Messages

Phone messages can be a source of privacy issues as well. This is why certain phone apps give you the option to encrypt them. This means that any links, texts, photos, or attachments that you send are run through a system so that anything that’s intercepted can’t be read or looked at.

Protecting Your Mobile Data

And though it’s not necessarily encryption, protecting your data on your mobile devices falls into the same category of privacy and safety. You can set your devices up with a password, and if someone fails a certain number of times, all of your data will be erased, which means that no one can access it after a failed hack attempt.