On becoming a digital citizen...

Over the summer we've run a series of blog posts on the topic of digital citizenship, drawing upon material from the MOOC on Becoming a Digital Citizen which we ran last year. In this final post of the series, Susan Halfpenny wraps things up...

So what does it mean to become a digital citizen? In the first blog post in this series I stated that “the ‘digital citizen’ is a person who has developed the skills and knowledge to effectively use the internet and digital technologies”; someone who makes use of these technologies in a appropriate and responsible way to engage and participate in society and politics. Isin and Ruppert (2015) take this definition a step further, suggesting that if we constitute ourselves as digital citizens, we have become subjects of power in cyberspace: we are enacting ourselves on the internet, considering and understand the opportunities presented by this medium, such as anonymity, open communication, and participation across geographical boundaries. The digital citizen is also aware of the challenges presented by our information society and a post-truth era where governments have the technology for surveillance on a mass scale.

In this blog series we have considered some of the opportunities and challenges that digital communications technologies present. Is the internet of things presenting further opportunities for mass surveillance? Is anonymity really an option online, or are we risking being publicly shamed? We've looked at both the positives and negatives that technologies can present: how these technologies can be harnessed to improve communications and benefit societies, and how they can be employed to manipulate information and prevent participation. Through the exploration of these topics we can start to comprehend the complexity of our digital citizenship.

When writing our course on digital citizenship, the key concept we felt that resonated throughout all of the topics were ideas of evolution, change and development, and society. There is an interesting contradiction posed by the permanence of online transactions and the vulnerability of our online data. Revisiting this topic in blog form, these themes have once again become apparent. Once you start to explore some of the complexities of the internet and digital communications — and the ways in which they have influenced our behaviour as citizens — it raises more questions that require further consideration before we can state with certainty that we have become a digital citizen (or even truly understand what it would mean to be one).

The digital citizen is therefore a multifaceted beast, and what it means to become a digital citizen is open to interpretation: it changes dependent upon you perspective, reflecting your beliefs, values and ideals. In a sense you don’t ever become a digital citizen: it is a continual process of learning, engaging, and participating in our digital society.

We hope that this series has sparked your interest in how digital technologies have changed behaviour, society, and culture. If you are interested in finding out more about the digital society, why not join Stephanie and I as we embark on our new learning journey... into the world of digital wellbeing! In our new free online course, Digital Wellbeing, we will be exploring concepts of health, relationships and society in the digital age. If that sounds interesting, do feel free to sign up! We look forward to seeing you there...

Digital Wellbeing:
a free online course
15th October 2018

The digital world as a uniting force

This week we begin to draw our digital citizenship strand to a close with Alison Kaye looking at some of the various ways in which our digital world can bring us together...

The internet, and social media in particular, has broken down tremendous boundaries.

Once, if we wanted to talk to someone at the other side of the world, we would probably do it through a pen-pal scheme. Conversation would be a slow process. We could perhaps make an international telephone call, but that would be terribly expensive. Now we can (and do) engage in live chat, send photographs and other media to each other, even talk by Skype: global friendships and global relationships have become a real, present, instantaneous thing. Many of us are now genuinely engaging in a global community (or at the very least an anglophone global community - the Tower of Babel has not quite been rebuilt, although translation systems become more advanced by the year).

Communities of interest have been able to come together in ways they never could before. It's really easy to find other people who are into that thing you're into. And that has benefits not just in terms of communication, but also in terms of organisation.

Crowdsourcing

Common crowdsourcing activities include crowdvoting and crowdfunding, but essentially it can be used for all kinds of purposes: to gain collaboration on creative or research projects; to gather ideas; to collaborate on a product; to gather data; to raise funding… It can be used for profit-based activities (and big businesses are certainly using these methods) but there is also a big potential for not-for-profit activities. Perhaps one of the most well-known crowdsourced activities online is Wikipedia, which we've been linking to liberally in these posts. This free online encyclopedia allows anyone to go in and add and edit entries for items, and at the time of writing it has over five million English language articles.

While such collaborative activities happened before the digital age, the internet provides an excellent platform to target many people who can be geographically very distant but share a common goal or interest. Of course there are risks: An infamous example was when The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) launched an online campaign asking the public to name their new £200 million polar research vessel. Thanks to the mischievous efforts of social media, the public collectively chose the name Boaty McBoatface. This frivolous name was felt to be in conflict with the credibility of the NERC, who ultimately decided to shun democracy and risk offending public opinion by selecting the name RSS Sir David Attenborough instead (fifth-placed in the vote), though as a compromise, the name Boaty McBoatface was assigned to the ship’s high-tech, remotely operated sub-sea vehicle.

Crowdsourcing ideas

Idea competitions or innovation contests provides a way for organisations to move beyond the limited capacity of their employees and gather fresh inspiration from their wider customer base. Customers move from being content consumers to content-creators. Lego saw the great potential they had in their very active community of fans by collaborating with Japanese website Cuusoo in 2008 to create Lego Ideas. The concept allows anyone to submit an idea for a Lego kit and potentially see that idea brought to life. If enough support is gained (10,000 votes), Lego’s marketing and design experts review your idea. This allows Lego to not only gather new ideas from customers, but also to see which ideas are the most popular with the community (and theoretically most marketable), while simultaneously making customers feel more connected to the company. Sets generated through the project, like the Minecraft and Ghostbusters builds, have since gone on to spawn their own Lego ranges, including some of Lego’s best-selling sets.

Crowdfunding

In their 2010 article “Crowdfunding of small entrepreneurial ventures”, Schwienbacher and Larralde define crowdfunding as…

…an open call, essentially through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donation or in exchange for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes.

In simple terms, it allows people to raise monetary contributions from a large audience who are interested in the product or goal being delivered at the end. It can be seen as a form of alternative finance. Offline, this has taken the form of benefit events and the likes, but it is now increasingly performed via internet-mediated registries. Several crowdfunding platforms have been created, such as Kickstarter (so successful as to be effectively synonymous with the concept), allowing the public to support specific projects without the need for large amounts of capital. In some cases the platform can be medium specific, like Unbound, a crowdfunding publishing house for books.

Crowdfunded projects can range greatly in both goal and magnitude, from small artistic projects to entrepreneurs seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed capital as an alternative to traditional venture capital investment. However, according to research by Mollick in 2013, crowdfunded projects tend either to succeed by small amounts or fail by large amounts, so this kind of overwhelming success is rare.

Crowd campaigning and cyberactivism

Crowdfunding can also be used as a means of raising money for charity. GlobalGiving is a platform which allows individuals to donate to a selection of small philanthropic projects proposed by nonprofit organizations worldwide for humanitarian and charitable causes. Meanwhile, sites like JustGiving serve as the modern equivalent of a sponsorship form, giving platform to individual members of the public who are raising money for charity. A recent high-profile example in the UK is The Helen Titchener (nee Archer) Rescue Fund which raised over £170,000 ostensibly for a fictional character from a radio soap opera, but in practical terms for the domestic violence charity Refuge.

This example serves as a reminder that online crowdfunding is still tremendously reliant on transmission of message, and that old media like radio and television can still have a role to play. Nonetheless, digital tools have opened up a host of new ways for activists to propagate their message. Electronic communications like social media, email, and podcasts allow activists to communicate very quickly and get their information to a large audience.

Petitioning is another old approach given new blood by the strength-in-numbers to be gained online. Platforms like 38 degrees and change.org provide a space for people to create petitions, gather support and organise events. If a large enough number of people support the petition, the organisations who can influence change may be more inclined to listen and consider taking action. The UK government even has its own petitions platform, with a guaranteed government response (albeit not necessarily a positive one) should the petition gain 10,000 signatories.

There are many examples of other creative ways in which people use online communications and digital tools effectively to campaign for change. The BOBS (Best of Online Activism) were a series of international awards to honour “creative and brave projects online that cross language and cultural barriers and thereby showcases the best of what the ever-expanding World Wide Web has to offer.” A look at some of the past winners will give you a flavour of just some of the ways people have harnessed the potential of digital tools and online communications to make big changes in the world.

Censorship

This week's digital citizenship blogpost, by Susan Halfpenny, has been redacted...

Do we have a censorship problem?

Wikipedia defines censorship as…

…the suppression of free speech, public communication or other information which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions.

We often associate censorship with the restriction of obscene or graphic images, or the suppression of extreme or offensive language from an audience: a beep to block out the swearing in a pre-watershed broadcast, or pixelation over certain anatomical parts. A prime online example of this is community standards which prohibit nudity.

However, censorship happens for a variety of different reasons beyond the obscene or offensive, such as national security, control of illegal images, prevention of hate speech and protection of vulnerable groups such as children. The main reasons for government-mandated censorship may be political, religious and/or cultural.

Censorship is not a new thing. Its origins can be traced to the office of censor established in Rome in 443 BC. Throughout history, for as long as human discourse has existed, those in power have suppressed speech or writings deemed objectionable. But censorship over the internet can be automated to an unprecedented scale. What’s more, this mass-censorship can be conducted so discreetly that users aren’t even aware the information has been suppressed.

Internet censorship takes two main forms: user-side censorship and publisher-side censorship. User-side censorship disrupts the link between the user and the publisher. An example would be content blockers being used by an individual, network, or service provider, to prevent access to certain websites based on the materials they contain. Publisher-side censorship refers to instances of websites blocking users who try to access their services, be it from particular locations (something commonplace in online broadcasting), through certain browsers (perhaps because the browser is considered out of date or incompatible with the website, or because the user is employing an anonymised service such as Tor), or on more pernicious grounds such as social demographics. This also ties in with a more subtle form of censorship: censorship by exclusion, such as with targeted advertising that excludes certain groups. With automated systems in place, right of appeal against being blocked or censored can be a difficult, sometimes even Kafkaesque process.

Censorship systems are employed widely, often with blanket implementation, and this can result in ‘overblocking’. In 2008 a Wikipedia article for the Scorpions’ 1976 album “Virgin Killer” was blocked by a number of UK internet service providers after the web address appeared in a blacklist. This conflicted with Wikipedia’s own anti-vandalism blocking mechanisms and left many people in the UK unable to edit the encyclopaedia. Internet-filtering technologies are used in a large proportion of public libraries and other public institutions in the UK, the US, and elsewhere, in some cases preventing access to websites covering sexual health advice, LGBT issues and mainstream political content. Even Facebook’s nudity policies have been criticised for over-censorship, blocking artworks and breast cancer awareness campaigns.

UK and US censorship is significant, but is dwarfed by the activity of some countries. The US-based think-tank Freedom House in its 2015 report into freedom on the net, identified 15 countries where social media and/or communications apps are blocked, and 31 where political, social and/or religious content is blocked. 17 had implemented new laws increasing censorship, and 40 had arrested users for their online content.

Internet censorship unquestionably threatens free and open access to information, and our right to freedom of expression; this isn’t just the moaning of old web-anarchists pining for the days when the internet was a sandpit with no sense of consequence. One of the key issues with censorship on the internet is that there is no code of conduct, no clarity, and often no right to reply: as internet censorship researcher Sheharbano Khattak puts it: “those doing the censoring… aren’t in the habit of revealing what they are blocking access to”.

Is democracy possible in the surveillance state?

For today's contribution to our digital citizenship strand, Susan Halfpenny tries to post to the blog without anyone noticing...

In recent years we've seen a growth in mass surveillance of citizens by state and intelligence agencies, through the monitoring of digital communications and the gathering of internet usage data. In the brief time that you have been reading this article, the United States National Security Agency (NSA) alone will have selected close to two terabytes of data for review; that’s the equivalent of about 50 two-hour high-definition movies.

In 2013, NSA sub-contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified information from the NSA that revealed numerous global surveillance programmes. The first and most controversial story revealed that the NSA were gathering phone records from telecoms company Verizon, with evidence quickly following that this mass mining of data extended to virtually every other telephone company in America and that data taps were happening on a global scale.

A 2015 report by US think-tank Freedom House found 14 countries imposing new laws or directives increasing surveillance or restricting online anonymity. The level of surveillance already undertaken by the state and intelligence agencies has reached levels that are almost Orwellian. Big brother is watching you… we are just missing the slogan being ubiquitously displayed to remind us of the fact.

“If you've nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear”

A common position presented by government surveillance programmes in opposition to their threat to privacy is the ‘nothing to hide’ argument. In Britain, for example, when the government installed public surveillance cameras in towns and cities, a government campaign slogan for the programme declared “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear”. We have seen this argument emerge again in Britain in response to the provisions of the Investigatory Powers Act, which enables the interception of communications and the retention of communications data, and to the data gathered by UK signals intelligence service GCHQ.

The ‘nothing to hide’ argument is founded on the idea that if you are a law abiding citizen then the data gathered should be of no concern; that the surveillance provides no threat to privacy but rather offers us protection from criminals and terrorists.

Why privacy matters (even if you have nothing to hide)

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.

— Edward Snowden on Reddit

Perhaps the most rehearsed response to the ‘nothing to hide’ argument is that benign governments can so easily give way to malign ones. This is a significant reason for caution. But stakes are high even without a fully realised dystopia. The ‘nothing to hide’ argument narrows the understanding of privacy to a singular essence, ignoring the complexity of the concept. Privacy is multifaceted; in a 2011 piece for Wired, Bruce Sterling described it as a plurality of different things that bear resemblance to one another but do not share any one element. For example, the invasion of privacy might be the disclosure of your secrets, maybe revealing how much you get paid, something you didn’t want others to know. In this case the harm to you is that information that you would have preferred to keep concealed is revealed to others. Another example of invasion of privacy may be that you’re being watched by a Peeping Tom – someone observing you as you go about your personal business (maybe taking the kids to school, or eating dinner with family or friends). In this case the harm is that you are being watched, something that you would probably find creepy even if the person watching you doesn’t find anything sensitive or doesn’t share the information with anyone else.

There are lots of other examples and forms of invasion of privacy. These include, blackmail, misuse of personal data, deception, violation of confidentiality, intrusion, misappropriation, and the gathering of extensive data (to state but a few). So, to go back to the concept of privacy, we can see that this involves many things and cannot be reduced to just one simple idea.

Civil Liberties and intellectual freedom

Being able to access information confidentially enables citizens to research, investigate and seek out ideas that challenge the status quo. It enables us to freely explore without fear of retribution; to question politics, culture, democracy and society.

Mass surveillance therefore inevitably poses a threat to citizens’ civil liberties and intellectual freedom, but so does another aspect of state control: censorship. That's an area we'll take a look at in our next post in a fortnight's time.

Public shaming and the mob

For our latest post on the topic of digital citizenship, Stephanie Jesper tries not to make a mistake...

Someone is wrong on the internet - how do you respond? Social media, comments sections, forums... all of these are fundamentally discursive tools, so response is certainly an option. Perhaps, as xkcd implied, you have a duty to respond.

But there is an old mantra of the internet, the more polite version of which goes “don’t be a jerk”. As the Wikimedia community’s essay on this topic puts it:

Being right about an issue does not mean you’re behaving properly! Jerks are often right — but they’re still jerks… This is not the same as just being uncivil or impolite (though incivility and rudeness often accompany it). One can be perfectly civil and follow every rule of etiquette and still be wrong… Truly being civil and polite means that you show respect for others (such as in not needlessly pointing out grammar issues), even when right. Respect others even when you disagree.

We're generally familiar with trolling these days: behaviours aimed at deliberately sowing discord on the internet, often with the intent of undermining specific groups or people. But aspects of trolling can start in well-meaning ways: be it from a sense of accuracy or even a sense of moral responsibility.

Have you ever @-ed a politician or an organisation, or posted on their wall, to tell them that you disagree with their policy? How polite were you? Have you ever seen someone say something utterly despicable online, and felt a need to pull them up on it? How many other people do you think did a similar thing? We're all answerable to the things we post on line, and that means being prepared for responses beyond “Like” or “Favourite”. If you take a controversial position in a public forum, it seems reasonable that you may have to defend that point. The problems start to occur if that point reaches an audience beyond that which you originally intended: if it goes viral.

Jon Ronson’s 2015 book “So you’ve been publicly shamed” tackles the topic of online shaming, the mob mentality that can hit places like Twitter or Facebook when an opprobrious post starts getting shared beyond its original audience, and the often devastating consequences for the original poster. In this TED talk, he discusses a couple of (in some cases quite sweary) examples, and it’s somewhat horrifying to see how a single misjudged attempt at irony on Twitter can explode into a tirade of abuse from well-meaning people: abuse that grows into a frenzy and demands that the tweeter lose her job, which she ultimately does.

It isn’t just the scale of the response: thousands of people all sending a similar message of disappointment or disdain… These things start out as well-meaning responses, but once the hue and cry is raised and the mob begins to mass, feelings become heightened and thought of consequence can easily go out of the window. The mob is a compelling beast, as has long been established by sociologists. Be it convergence, contagion, or some other compulsion, we find ourselves drawn in to the pile-on, and as the numbers escalate, so does the sense of outrage. The outcome isn’t simply an unusably busy notifications page; in many cases, the author of the contentious post loses their job, as with the earlier example in the Jon Ronson piece, and with these cases:

• Why you should think twice before shaming anyone on social media

• ‘Overnight, everything I loved was gone’: the internet shaming of Lindsey Stone

Perhaps they deserved a rebuking tweet; but they probably didn’t deserve to have their livelihoods destroyed.

Wikipedia lists a range of examples of online shaming, not all of which seem quite as horrific as those mentioned above. Indeed, in some cases, the technique has been used against people engaged in criminal behaviour, as a means of exacting justice. In her 2015 book, “Is Shame Necessary? New uses for an Old Tool”, Jennifer Jacquet proposes the use of shaming for:

Transgressions that have a clear impact on broader society – like environmental pollution – and transgressions for which there is no obvious formal route to punishment

She suggests, as a rule of thumb, to “go after groups”, although she does not exempt individuals who are “politically powerful” or who “sizeably impact society”, so long as “the punishment is proportional”. There though lies the problem: how can you determine proportionality? How can you judge what’s an appropriate response? In short, how do you not be a jerk?

Legal rights and responsibilities

In this week's digital citizenship blog post, Susan Halfpenny and Stephanie Jesper share too much information...

For those of us who, through some social awkwardness or other, struggled with the challenges and responsibilities we encountered in our everyday lives, the online world came as a blessing: it was a benign anarchy; a sandpit with no sense of consequences. Images were shared without caring about who made them in the first place, and memes were established as a consequence. Likewise with music and video, when the bandwidth had increased sufficiently to permit it. Cyberspace was a place where property laws did not apply: an information commons in the public domain.

But this was a fantasy. Rights owners soon learnt what was going on and were keen to regain control of their properties online. The 2000s saw a steady shift as businesses caught onto the opportunities of the internet. Spotify and iTunes found efficient and legitimate ways to replace music-sharing services like Napster and its successors, and the likes of Netflix and Amazon Video are doing similar things with video. But respecting rights of ownership can still be a challenge, especially if rights-holders don’t engage with the accepted online channels.

The deaths of David Bowie and Prince in 2016 highlight the complexities of online rights very effectively: following Bowie’s death, social media was awash with shared videos, images, music and film. Sharing is how social media intrinsically works, and also how society tends to work more generally. People shared their grief through artifacts for which they were not the rights holders, or linked to YouTube videos put up by fans with little or no regard to whatever individual or company actually owned the copyright.

When Prince died, a few months later, there was notably less of this going on. Prince had taken a firm stand regarding his music copyright, with takedowns issued on YouTube, and his albums pulled from streaming services. His argument was that artists could not earn a living from streaming royalties, and it’s an argument that for the most part holds true, certainly for smaller acts. It could be countered that the internet serves as a form of free advertising, and that online sharing can translate into sales, though this is far from evident in the record industry.

It’s clear then that the challenges and responsibilities we face in the online world are great and morally complex. On the one hand we want to celebrate our heroes and share in our enjoyment of their works. On the other hand, we also want to see artists recompensed, or at the very least, stay on the right side of the law. It’s a conflict we all have to negotiate in our online behaviour; and it’s one of many. The conversational nature of social media has seen numerous people charged with libel and other offenses. In some cases this has initiated changes in the law to adapt to the new circumstances of the digital age; in many cases it has firmly established a continuity of the law within the digital realm. Even a deleted post can leave a trace — there is no ten second rule in terms of social media.

What laws do we need to be aware of?

Social media and online interaction allows us all to be journalists, researchers, and, effectively, online publishers. We’re publishing our thoughts and opinions to a global audience. Are we therefore subject to the same laws of privacy, defamation, copyright, marketing, official secrets, (the list goes on), as traditional publishers?

The short answer to this is yes.

We need to think about what we are sharing, and ask ourselves whether it is in line with the legislation that governs creative outputs, the use of other people’s data, human rights and other legal rights. But unlike many large publishing firms, we haven’t all got our own legal team, nor are we likely to have a fighting fund to pay any legal fees that may come our way, should we do something that turns out to be questionable in the eyes of the law.

And it’s made more complicated still by the fact that we are publishing our thoughts globally. It would be impossible to go into detail of all the laws across more than 200 jurisdictions that we potentially need to consider when we are publishing online.

Don’t let these legal complexities put you off going online, though. We’re subject to just as many in the offline world. If we behave in a socially responsible way, we should be able to avoid any unwanted interest from the law.

There's more about the legality and ethics of online engagement on our Information security Skills Guide and our Practical Guide to Copyright.

Is the password system broken?

For our latest look at the topic of digital citizenship, Susan Halfpenny must use at least one lower case character, upper case character, number and special character.

Large data breaches in recent years have led to millions of accounts being hacked and personal information being shared (take a look at World’s Biggest Data Breaches for a visual representation): the Yahoo! hack in 2013 resulted in more than one billion user account credentials being stolen.

Often, compromised security and theft of username and password information can lead to more than just one of your online accounts being compromised. Matt Honan has written at length about his experience of being “epically hacked”, where in the space of an hour his Google account was deleted, his Twitter account taken over and his AppleID account broken into, resulting in the data being deleted from his iPhone, iPad and MacBook.

Hackers will often exploit weaknesses in security systems to access information. For example, in the iCloud leak of celebrity photos in 2014, hackers may have taken advantage of a flaw in the application interface which permitted unlimited attempts to guess passwords. Could companies do more, then, to protect our information?

Encryption and adding layers of security to applications can obviously help, but the major flaws undermining everything else are the limitations of human memory, our collective lack of understanding regarding what factors make a password secure, and our lack of patience. More often than not, though, we will give our information away through phishing emails and poor personal information security like using the same weak password for every account. We might try to come up with more, but, in our modern, busy lives, who of us can remember a hundred and one different and adequately complex passwords?

Even those of us who should or do have a high level of awareness and understanding of information security will still fall prey to laziness. I’m currently trying to use two-step authentication to keep my accounts more secure, but I hate it when I have gone to deliver a workshop and then realise I have forgotten to pick up my phone from my desk, so I then need to head back to the office to collect it in order that I can receive the text message containing the additional one-use code that I need to employ to access my account. It’s times like this that there is a very compelling temptation to switch the two-step authentication off!

The current password system relies too much on our memory and our patience; and on the everyday person who isn’t trained to think about information security all day. We might therefore say that the current passwords system is broken.

So how are hackers exploiting security flaws and human errors?

You may be surprised to hear that hackers aren’t necessary using complicated coding to hack into account. Yes, sometimes large scale attack will take place using programs to attack security flaws, but often passwords can be guessed through social engineering: using the information you share online. For some stark examples, take a look at this article by Kevin Roose where he exploits the digital literacies of hackers to highlight security risks.

Norton collated some useful information about the different ways that hackers hack into your passwords, summarised below:

• Social engineering: the use of information lifted from your social media to gather answers to your security questions… things like the school you went to, your pet’s name, when you got married, when it’s your birthday, your favourite band… Hackers can gain access to all this information and use it to answer your security questions and guess your passwords.

• Dictionary attacks: using programs that cycle through a predetermined list of common words often used in passwords. If you are using Password1 as the password for your account then what did you think was going to happen?! To better protect your accounts from dictionary attacks, avoid using common words and phrases in your passwords, or avoid recognisable words altogether.

• Password crackers: programs used to crack passwords by brute force, repeatedly trying millions of combinations of characters, until your password is detected. Shorter and less complex passwords are quicker to guess for the program. Longer, more complicated passwords take exponentially longer to guess, so the longer and weirder the better!

But if we’re creating lengthy and complex passwords, how can we hope to remember them? Mnemonics can only get us so far. We could potentially use some form of encrypted password management software, but vulnerabilities apply there too: guessing one password may give the hacker access to all of your passwords! Still, it should be more secure than using the same password(s) for everything, because there’s only a single point of failure (the password manager) rather than multiple points of failure (every account you own). Whatever method you choose to use, a set of complicated but securely stored passwords should be far more secure than several easily memorable passwords, if only because they’ll be considerably less guessable.

For more help and advice, take a look at the IT Services tips for choosing a strong password, and test yourself in our information security myths quiz.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog (unless you tell them)

Our series of explorations into what it means to be a digital citizen continues with Stephanie Jesper pretending to be a dog...

As Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon for the New Yorker put it: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The internet only knows what you tell it. And what you might want to reveal may vary according to what it is that you want to do. There is a long tradition on internet forums and bulletin boards of using a pseudonymous screen-name or handle. In a large part this was a mechanism to permit discussion of ‘sensitive’ subjects: an alias is a very simple way of distancing your online profile from your off-line one, be it for social, professional, or even legal reasons. But choosing an amusing or clever name can also serve as a fun means of expressing a persona. What is more, pseudonymic screen names can facilitate objectivity in a discussion: social factors such as gender, age, location, education and race may be obscured (partially or entirely), reducing the impact of preconceived biases. A screen name can also allow a user to experiment with or hone their identity (for example in the trans community), and may give confidence to those who might, under their real name, feel socially awkward for whatever reason. This confidence boost can be double-edged, of course: hiding behind a screen name may give you courage to express yourself and your opinions and to explore areas of society and culture that you may otherwise have been too afraid to examine (be it a question of taboo, reputational risk, a fear of failure, or some other impediment), but it can also give you the courage to test the limits of your powers, to be abusive and to threaten other users without fear of recourse. At its most pathetic, this is manifest in Wikipedia vandalism and childishly disruptive behaviour in internet forums; at the other extreme lies persistent trolling, bullying, and even death-threats.

By using an online pseudonym, we make it intentionally difficult for people to connect our online activities to our real-world persona, which is fine unless we actually want that association. We may be looking to promote ourselves, and to connect with people we know, used to know, or want to know in real life, in which case a pseudonym is probably going to get in the way. This is why Facebook and LinkedIn operate real name policies: they’re geared around people finding other people. The problem with being findable, however, is that you can’t especially control who can find you. Having a potential employer find your LinkedIn profile might be a positive thing (assuming it’s an attractive profile); having them find your Facebook profile might be less positive, depending on what you’ve got on there and how locked down it is.

There’s a tradeoff to be had between self-promotion and freedom of expression, and many approaches to take. You could lead a completely uncontroversial life, online and off, and have the tenacity and resilience to be able to cope with any unwanted intrusion. You could live entirely under the cloak of anonymity, but then you may find that you’ve relinquished control of the top search results for your real name, which may not necessarily be a favourable state of affairs. A better solution is to conduct your social activity under one name, and your professional activity under another: some people, especially on Twitter, make use of two accounts – one professional and one social – and Twitter’s own mobile apps support switching between multiple accounts. But in many professions the social use may actually prove a professional advantage, and separating the two can be both a difficult and a false dichotomy to make.

The information trail we leave online isn’t just a reputational concern. We can give away a lot of personal details, and while for the most part this will be just noise in the internet, it is information that can be used against us.

The TV series Hunted provides an effective (and indeed entertaining) illustration of how our online activity can betray our movements, our intentions and our personal networks. In some cases, confiscated devices, phishing attempts and hacked passwords are used as a means of gaining sensitive information, but all too regularly the clues hide in plain sight: on open social media accounts that any of us can see.

If you’re posting in an open forum, anybody can access that information. Tweeting something like…

Holiday! Just hope my new bike can bear 2 weeks without me, languishing in the backyard of 12A The Grove, Chepstow. Forgot to chain it. Oops

…is obviously a bad idea. But communicating even snippets of such information has risks (as we explore on our Subject Guides) because snippets can build up into a larger picture about you and your circumstances.

It isn’t just what we post that poses a potential risk. Our accounts themselves may be sharing more than we might think, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal has demonstrated. If you’ve ever seen your Facebook profile picture staring back at you from the comments section of a blog post, inviting you to participate, or if you’ve seen adverts targeting your interests, you’ll have an idea of the kind of thing that can get passed around. It’s a good idea to go through your social media security settings with a fine-toothed comb every now and again, to lock down as much as you’re able, but inevitably there is a tradeoff between security and functionality. As with so much, it’s a case of striking a balance and being aware of the risks involved.

The need to know

In our second of a series of explorations on what it means to be a digital citizen, Stephanie Jesper and Alison Kaye assert their inalienable right to WiFi.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (revised)

For many of us, internet access has become ubiquitous. As the meme above illustrates, over the course of a single generation we have become profoundly reliant upon our connection to the net.

It’s hard to imagine how those of us who were alive in the early 1990s managed to cope without the world’s knowledge at our fingertips everywhere we went. Arguments over matters of trivia would last for days until Wikipedia became but a few thumb-swipes away. If you’ve ever been to a conference with inadequate WiFi, or taken a holiday in the middle of nowhere, with no network access, you’ve a flavour of what it must be like to live in information poverty.

We're being flippant, of course, but with so much of modern life being online, including job applications and government paperwork, those of us who are not online are at quite a considerable disadvantage. Over half of the world’s population (about 52% as of the end of 2017) do not have an internet connection. Even in the UK, the figure is about 7% — c.5m people (that's more people than watch Gogglebox). These people lack what for many of us has become a basic necessity.

This is why countries such as Costa Rica, Finland, France and Greece have enshrined some form of internet access rights in law, and why in 2011 the UN Special Rapporteur recommended that:

Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all States.

Bridging the skills gap

The skills gap

But even for those of us who can get online, we still need the skills required to effectively engage in the modern workforce and our digital society. In 2015 the UK Select Committee on Digital Skills, appointed by the House of Lords “to consider and report on information and communications technology, competitiveness and skills in the United Kingdom”, raised alarm bells in their Make or break report. They referred to work by the UK Forum for Computing Education (UKForCE) into the skills required for different occupations. UKForCE outline 4 categories of skill levels required for the population of the labour market:

Digital muggle

“… no digital skills required—digital technology may as well be magic”.

Digital citizen

“… the ability to use digital technology purposefully and confidently to communicate, find information and purchase goods/services”.

Digital worker

“… at the higher end, the ability to evaluate, configure and use complex digital systems. Elementary programming skills such as scripting are often required for these tasks”.

Digital maker

“… skills sufficient to build digital technology (typically software development)”.

They used this framework to analyse the 361 Standard Occupation Codes, a common classification system used to map all occupations in the UK according to their skill level and skill content, to show the following:

Percentage of the UK workforce in each category

According to these figures, 93% of UK jobs require at least some digital skills — skills that 12 million of us in the UK lack. And with automation estimated to threaten 35% of UK jobs, the need for digital skills becomes all the greater.

Libraries can have a role in bridging this skills gap, offering access to digital technologies, fostering the literacies required to navigate the world of digital information, and thereby enabling digital citizenship and participation in digital society (Explore York, for instance, have drop-ins for tablets and e-readers, one-to-one sessions on computer basics, and an introductory course on using the internet).

And here at the University of York there've been a number of projects to develop digital skills for both students and staff. Library & IT staff have been working with departments to incorporate digital literacy across all courses, and we’ve also put together a new programme of digital skills training sessions. Alongside all of this there's our online Skills Guides which are open for anybody to access and use, and we're currently working on an IT Essentials site to help people escape their muggledom and exercise some digital wizardry.

The connected world

In our first of a series of explorations on what it means to be a digital citizen, Stephanie Jesper wires up this blog to her web-enabled toaster and sees what pops out.

Ask a futurologist what our digital future holds for us, and they’ll come up with some pretty mad stuff…

There’s “augmented reality” (AR), for instance: where our view of the world is digitally enhanced in real time. We perhaps may scoff at people going around in head-up display smartglasses like the shortlived Google Glass, yet the craze of the summer of 2016 was the smartphone AR game Pokémon Go. AR technology is still largely in its infancy, but it is already finding speculative applications in a range of areas, including medicine and industry, and it's been used to particular effect in the museums sector. Whether this technology will lead us into a utopia or a dystopia is unclear. Maybe this video project by Keiichi Matsuda will help you to judge!

Another thing that futurologists love is the idea of the “internet of things”: a myriad of connected devices beyond what we usually think of as networked technology. For years we’ve been told how smart fridges will reorder our food as we eat it, and the usual response is something along the lines of “well that’s fine if I want to keep eating exactly the same things week in week out”. But more and more of us are hooking up our televisions to the router and watching Netflix and Amazon Video through them. We might even change the channels using a remote control app we’ve downloaded to our phone. We’ve got wearable technology like Fitbits on our wrist to keep track of our health and fitness. We might have an app to remotely control our central heating or even turn the oven on while we’re commuting home. We may have set up a baby monitor linked to a tablet, or have a doorbell we can answer from work. And for those of us who are skeptical of the refrigerator ordering our shopping, there are Amazon Dash buttons we can press when we do need to stock up. All these linked technologies are steadily creeping into our homes, hooking onto our WiFi, and hopefully making our lives that bit easier.

This is not without risk: not that our internet-connected food processor is likely to gain sentience and go rogue… But all these devices have computers inside them, and computers are susceptible to hacking and malware. In October 2016, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack described at the time as the largest on record brought down a range of sites including CNN, Netflix, the Guardian, Reddit and Twitter. The attack was facilitated using Mirai malware that had found its way onto a range of devices including Internet of Things appliances (in particular, digital video records and web-enabled cameras). Manufacturers urged owners to change passwords on such devices from their factory-set defaults in a bid to improve their security, but this is not always straightforward (and in some cases may even be impossible). Until new security methods can be devised, our devices remain vulnerable to further attacks of this nature. With something like a webcam, the thought of being hacked becomes especially alarming, even if the chances of someone actually being interested enough to hack into your camera and watch you are probably pretty slim. What’s more, the United States director of national intelligence, James Clapper, stated in 2016 that:

In the future, intelligence services might use the [internet of things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials…

Technology companies may already even be doing that. With internet-connected devices, it's not just Alexa who's listening in. Something like your television can be gathering viewing habits or listening to your conversations, picking up lots of juicy (potentially salable) information about you. It’s easy to become paranoid when faced with things like this. The important thing, though, is to stay informed, and to understand the risks: in pretty much all aspects of digital technology, we’re faced with having to balance benefits against risks. Only through awareness of those risks can we make an informed choice, and/or press for legislation and greater security, lest we accidentally find ourselves inviting an Orwellian surveillance state into our living rooms.

Becoming a digital citizen

In today's post, Susan Halfpenny introduces a series of articles looking at the topic of digital citizenship...

The ‘digital citizen’ is a person who has developed the skills and knowledge to effectively use the internet and digital technologies; who uses digital technologies and the internet in a responsible and appropriate way in order to engage and participate in society and politics.

Back in 2016 we embarked on our first journey into the world of Massive Open Online Courses, with our Digital Citizenship course, which launched on 23 January 2017 on the FutureLearn platform. Over the next few months we'll be publishing a series of blog posts on this theme based on the content of that course.

Why Digital Citizenship?

We live in a world where the use of digital technology has become the norm. Effective participation in our society increasingly requires our ability to engage online. This isn’t just a question of technical ability – just as with our physical society, there are appropriate and responsible behaviours we need to acquire.

The Digital Citizenship three week course investigated and explored the concept of the digital society. It looked at how personal values and ethical judgments shape our online participation, and how new technologies can be applied to solve some of the problems we might face. The aim of the course was to develop digital capabilities, and awareness of the cultural and ethical implications of using digital technologies, and it sought to establish in its participants the skills required to become an effective and successful digital citizen.

Digital access and information inequalities

In this theme we explored the rise of digital technologies and the implications for society. We traversed the digital divide, and considered the barriers to accessing modern information and communications technologies. Participants reflected on their own digital skills and undertook a literature search on the digital society.

Digital identity and security

Within this theme we started by considered what we mean by digital literacies, and whether new generations brought up in digital world automatically possess the necessary digital skills. We looked at digital identities and personas, from managing our digital footprints to how we present ourselves online. Participants engaged with information security issues and looked at strategies for protecting themselves in the online world. This theme concluded with an exploration of some of the challenges and responsibilities of online engagement: how do you manage negative attention, and do you behave in a legal or ethical way?

Digital participation and ethics

Finally, we looked at positive uses of the internet: how we can harness its powers to reach new audiences, engage with research literature, and generally improve the world? We looked at how digital tools can encourage engagement from harder-to-reach groups or non-traditional audiences, exploring both the success stories and the darker forces using the medium for illegal activities.

The development of the course was a collaborative endeavour involving academics from across the science, social sciences and humanities faculties, as well as support staff. The collaboration with academic staff made this a rich experience for our learners, enabling them to engage with current research on digital citizenship and the use of digital technologies at the University.

We hope you enjoy our collection of blog posts on this subject over the next few months. When we're done, you'll be able to find them all under the Digital citizenship tag.