SAN DIEGO — In its early days, the internet seemed harmless. It was a fun way to keep in touch through email, share photos on your personal blog, and watch the hottest videos before the term “viral” was a thing.
But now it’s 2022, and the internet is firmly apart of our lives.
Today, over 90% of all Americans go online and many couldn’t imagine a world without it. It’s how we work, get entertainment and most importantly, the internet is the way we connect with the world around us.
For people like me, who’s been connecting and sharing things to the worldwide web since I was a teenager. It’s safe to say it’s not hard to find an unflattering picture from those days.
"If it's on the internet, it's there forever," said David Nuti, the Senior Vice President in North America for Nord Security, a web-based company with Internet safety tools.
After surveying over a thousand people, Nord found that 55% of users would completely delete themselves from the internet if they could, 26% would want old dating and social media profiles deleted, and 23% would want previous employment history scrubbed.
"It's a promising sign," said Nuti. "Not from a viewpoint of paranoia, but that people are becoming more aware of having good hygiene when they're moving around the internet, and taking some caution on to where their personal information is,"
Once it’s on the web, it’s not coming off, but there are several things you can do to make sure photos, data, and personal information don’t fall into the wrong hands.
Go through your social media and make sure you’re comfortable with what others are seeing, pick a complex password to prevent your accounts from being hacked. And for more security, add a VPN to your browser. It’s a way to hide all your web traffic from advertisers and hackers.
"There's no reason to be afraid of the internet," said Nuti. "Just pay attention to what you're doing and utilize the service that allows you to move around the internet safely and anonymously."
The internet has certainly evolved from what it once was, and our lives will continually be more connected by the worldwide web. Stories about trolls or other bad actors online are causing people to rethink how they navigate the web.
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