This weeks topic of internet safety brought up a number of interesting points.  Firstly almost everything you do on the web is being monitored in some way or another.  This is a scary thought but there are a few small comforts in that.  One public networks are the most visible and activity on them can be tracked quite easily.  The comfort here is that unless something is done to attract major suspicion your usage is accredited to a bar code.  That being said if John Doe spends more then 50% of his time at work online shopping it will be pretty easy for a tech supervisor to discover that user: 39482b7-C is John Doe.  So while not all your activity will be known to someone watching the network it wouldn’t be hard to discover who was doing what.

 

Secondly and probably most importantly is that the internet doesn’t forget, having images of yourself doing potentially illegal or frowned upon stuff could come back to haunt you in the future.  Therefore having a professional public image, ie on social media, and making it difficult to find your actions, by changing your name and permission, is essential for anyone looking to do work in a vulnerable sector.  This doesn’t mean that one has to keep a professional attitude all their lives but it does mean that monitoring what you do online is important to keeping that professional image.