News today that criminals are buying personal identities for as little as 50p should come as no great surprise.
In an age where almost everything from cash to family contact is being digitised, it's not hard to see huge opportunities for scams large and small.
According to a new study on Internet security, fraudsters can now buy your credit card details, your name, address and date of birth for less than the cost of a can of coke.
Data collected from over 200 countries showed 349.6 billion spam messages were sent in 2008, a 192% increase on the previous year.
In the midst of all this, more and more people are handing over details of their identities to criminals, via phishing websites. These are designed to mirror trustworthy web pages, and users are fooled into giving away their username, password and even bank details.
There are no guarantees of absolute security, but are there ways we can minimize the likelihood of falling victim to phishing and other forms of Internet scamming? The following will help:
1. Keep It Real.
In an age of growing dependence on virtual reality and other web-based tools, technology trackers are noticing the growing presence of a counter-trend.
There is a huge and growing need for high touch in the age of high-tech; a desire to challenge the social fragmentation that sometimes accompanies our reliance on technology.
As ingenious as ever, people are now using messaging to set up "spontaneous" live events, via "smart mobbing" which draws large groups to public places for demonstrations or celebrations.
In an age of cyber-this and cyber-that, it helps to consciously and deliberately seek out new opportunities to interact in face-to-face environments.
We need to constantly explore new ways of maintaining a real world 'first life' before we lose ourselves in an online Second Life!
Cyberspace is a nice place to visit, but you shouldn't have to live there!
2. Don't Digitise Emotion.
In a world of instant messaging via Twitter, Facebook and a plethora of other networking platforms, it gets easier to look to technology to provide our emotional diet.
Some people become discouraged or even depressed if they haven't received at least 10 e-mails, five Facebook messages and three tweets before nine in the morning.
It is this growing emotional aspect of our internet interaction which is leading to what Stanford University calls "internet addiction".
In April, 2007, a technical glitch in one region of the US denied service to five million Blackberry users. At the time, psychologists noted a sudden increase in the number of people complaining of symptoms including feelings of isolation and alienation - classic symptoms of drug withdrawal.
Some people even reported "phantom vibrations", when their Blackberries were out of order. I think the message here is not "you've got mail", but "you have a problem"!
We need to find ways of sustaining ourselves emotionally, which are not reliant on the use of technology.
3. Project Ahead.
Much of what we enter about ourselves will stay online permanently - either because we forget to remove it (the more we add, the harder it is to remember it all), or because the "digital echo" is impossible to totally expunge.
