In this article, How
Shutterfly and Other Social Sites Leave Your Kids Vulnerable to Hackers,
the author writes about how a very popular website, Shutterfly, doesn’t have
SSL which is a strong form of internet security used to prevent websites from
being hacked into. Shutterfly is a website that allows users to upload photos
of kids, home addresses, emails, gender information, phone numbers, school
names, jersey numbers, and game schedules all in one place. According to Mother Jones, Shutterfly knows that they
don’t have this internet security, but continue to not do anything about it and
when asked about it they went around the topic. Without SSL, this website can
be hacked into with just a few clicks by almost anyone, allowing them access to
all information of anyone that has an account on there. This is shown in the
article by Tony Porterfield, a technical engineer for Cisco in Los Altos,
California. Porterfield is trying to make this problem more known to parents
and coaches so they can become aware of the issue and remove all personal
information about their children from any website.
Like the last article we read, this is just more proof on
how bad the internet can be. The internet is a great tool to make things in
life easier, but parents and teachers need to be informed on the security of
the websites and how to detect if the website has the right security before
putting personal information out there. As a teacher I will need to do research
before using any online activities to make sure that the website has the right
amount of security. It is more important to not use the internet than to put my
students in danger.
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