#Selfie

The Selfie cyber culture today are concerned with their online presence, appearance, reactions from followers and their results. When you post a photo of yourself on the internet to be looked at by your peers or people you may not know, when you get a like your ‘up’ but when you get no likes your ‘down’. There is also the danger that your self-esteem may start to be related and tied to how many likes or comments you receive once you post a selfie. Lauren McMahon, writes about our selfie obsessed generation on TheCircular.

I have taken selfies, but really not to extent that some people do. We all have our Facebook, twitter, Instagram or Snapchat friends that really love sharing their ‘staged’ mug. What prompted me to write this blog was a recent grocery shop I was on. While shopping in Lidl I saw a girl by the fruit section taking a selfie of herself and a banana. She obviously wasn’t happy with the first result because she went on to take a few others from different angles. Then, there was issues with the filters she was using so, she rang someone who helped her through the dilemma. It was a tough call, but they decided that ether ‘Perpetua’ or ‘Hudson’ would be just fine. These are filters on Instagram for those of you who don’t know that can distort the colours of the picture you take. I waisted about 6-7 mins of my life watching her, but she saw it as she devoted 6-7 mins to maintain her online image and presence.

Selfie accessories…

selfie buttons

standered selfie stick

iPhone camera trigger

zuckerberg selfie stick

selfie brush

timer capture

We are even accommodating the selfie culture by creating selfie accessories. Now I would have thought that you need 1- yourself and 2 –  a camera, but NO. The selfie enthusiast will come complete with a bank of accessories. Such as, The Selfie stick which to be honest I can see the benefits of it. Like, if you were taking a group picture and you want to be in it, its amazing. Whip out the stick, pop your phone on, time the shot, DONE. Everyone’s happy. This stops you from asking a stranger around you to take the picture, and you don’t have to worry about your phone/camera being broken by another, who’s only trying to help or being stolen by that person! (because it has happened!!) You also don’t need to use a tripod, you don’t shake your hand as much with a selfie stick and there is much less of a chance of dropping your phone with the selfie sticks. Phonearena.com surprised me. The only selfie accessory to date that  I was aware of was the selfie stick, but there’s more. They have composed a list of the 5 most useful selfie taking accessories for the selfie-obsessives. Read about them, quite interesting really. One does not simply just take a selfie.

I personally thought that the HISY button was clever as I use a similar device for photo shoots as a photographer. It’s almost like the amature’s progression button towards professional techniques. HISY aims to help you take a selfie with an iPhone more easily. It’s a simple button that connects to the phone via low-energy Bluetooth, and takes control of the built-in shutter camera. HISY’s battery lasts for two years if you take 100 photos daily, which means the little’o button will last for a while. And when it expires, you can replace it with a plain CR2032 cell straight out of your local electronics shop. Of course, the gizmo can be used not just for selfies, but for all kinds of photographs too, even video. HISY doesn’t need a special app to run, it connects directly to the iPhone’s camera app, and can only be used with iPhones ISO7 or newer. Unlucky for the Android selfieists.

As much benefits as there are for using the selfie stick, there are a few cons too….

Museums, concerts, stores and some clubs are now banning the use of these sticks as there seen as a hazard and disturbance. In early March, two American tourists were arrested after they carved their names into a wall at Rome’s Colosseum and then the pair took a photo using a selfie stick. (true story). Rebecca Strong, Staff writer for Bostinno, has written an interesting article about our selfie obsessions and writes about it as an addiction. Can you actually develop a selfie addiction. When I thought about this, the answer I came up with was, Yes. Like any other addiction, it would come down to your personality and how influenced you can be as a person by trends, fads, peer pressure and whats fashionable.

In 2014 Ellen DeGeneres broke the Internet & beat Obama with most retweeted tweet with the Oscars Selfie with a Samsung on stage, but later switched to an iPhone backstage, which makes me ask the question, what is the selfie enthusiastic’s phone of choice for #Selfie. Bostinno have actually gone the extra mile and have listed features of the most popular selfie phones and also have taken the same picture with each phone to show you the difference in quality.

Few Facts Of the Origins of the word Selfie:

In November 2013, the word “selfie” was announced as being the “word of the year” by the Oxford English Dictionary, which gave the word itself an Australian origin. A “selfie” is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: ”a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smart phone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” The example they use is super-helpful because it also contains some etiquette advice: “Occasional selfies are acceptable, but posting a new picture of yourself every day isn’t necessary.” (hint, hint). Also The word Selfie, was coined by a drunk Australian in 2002. On January 28th 2014 The Chainsmoker’s released a song called #Selfie. It took the world by storm and verified the selfie culture as we know it. Bustle is a good website with great articles and facts on selfie origins.

Some people take the selfie obsession to far (Girl with the Banana in Lidl) or even the Cellfy Stic (which is now mainly used for bathroom selfies)… WHY??? -> others are just jumping along on the trend band waggon as am I. Selfies are fun, rather than living in the moment and remembering it from memories, you can take the memories while living in the moment.

So Until the next blog post,

Cybercrime, Get Ready!

Its becoming harder to protect what you put out online, than your physical belongings at home.

Recently, a friend of mine was burgled. Her house was broken into while she was at work and a lot of expensive things were stolen. Her smart TV, Macbook Pro, iPad Air, the list goes on. However the robbers didn’t take the expensive granite top pool table, smart microwave(it talks to you, I kid you not), a orthopeadic massage chair or a load of other quite expensive valuables. She was very worried about her TV, Macbook and iPad Air, but it did occur to me, it would have been far easier to take some of the other items, I mean the TV was hard enough to mount on the wall (i was there), but taking it down, in one piece, must have been quite difficult. All the stolen instruments that were stolen, were connected together with the same iCould account and her iCould key chain stored all her email logins and her PayPal details. The detectives on site suggested to my distraught friend that it seems it was a cyber crime. My friend at the time snapped back and said she wasn’t “Hacked”, but burgled.

The detectives advised then that she had an awful lot of other valuables that would have held a better market price to sell off again. They said that the guys who robbed her, robbed only those items(the ones I listed above). He asked her what they all had in common, and she said her iCloud account. PANIC PANIC. Cybercrime can happen online, but it can also happen in the real world. Cyber crime apparently cost the Irish government 630 million euros in 2014. Read more about Irish cyber crime statistics in this article.

She did what she could to change as many passwords and wiped what she could from these devises, but really, had the damage already been done?? I mean she had left for work at 730am and was home at 6pm to find that certain items had been stolen. Had the burglars taken the information they needed from her, before she tackled what she could?? There was no way of telling. It got us into a very interesting conversation though. Even 5-10 years ago, if you were robbed, you were robbed. You didn’t necessarily panic at the thought of your couch, tv, desktop Gateway(computer) or your Dell’asourous box(computer) being lifted. You felt hurt, upset, invaded, insecure. You may have even felt a sigh of relief as the Computer you used, you didn’t know how to use it anyway to save such personal details of you on it!

Anyway to recap, we wiped her iCloud account from all stolen devises(obviously after we tried find my iDevises, FYI, NOTHING), took it to her savvy technician friend to remote wipe key chains, and she was advised to wait. She also had to contact her employer to let them know, as she would have had work projects on these devises that would not really have been for public knowledge. There is actually no way to hive yourself piece of mind in the case of this.

About 2 weeks after the burglary, she was contacted by AIB, her banking branch to let her know that in Dublin somewhere, (well I know where, but I can’t tell you) to advise her that there was a series of unusual transactions taking place together. My friend was putting diesel into her car on her way to work & at the same time someone was using it in Dublin & spending pretty flamboyantly. She verified immediately this was not her spending in Dublin and to cancel all transactions and her bank account.

Long story short, they burglars were found, as were a lot of her stuff, and from her key chain details saving her bank details, they had made A LOT of copies of the same card using a card copying machine.

Cybercrime will be a huge issue by 2020. If we don’t wake up and prepare, we will be sitting ducks for hackers, crackers and burglars all around. These burglars were not your usual run of the mill, steel and shift on goods sort, they were the type to see what had value and inside value that would give them more financial knowledge. Go-Gulf is a website that hosts a series of blogs on different topics. It’s an American website so the statistics will represent the american economy, but to be fair we are never too far behind. The blog post that particularly caught my eye was about the rate at which cybersecurity rates will rise and cost by 2017.

This TED talk features speaker James Lyne.He talks about cyber crimes that happen every day, and what we can do to prevent them or stop them completely.

“James Lyne reminds us that it’s not only the NSA that’s watching us, but ever-more-sophisticated cybercriminals, who exploit both weak code and trusting human nature.” – TEDTalks

Online Identity

Your Online profile Digital Identity is a term used to describe the persona of an individual which presents across all the online communities that you’re a member of. When we use sites or services like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Ebay, Google or LinkedIn, we leave a ‘digital footprint‘. Every photo you share, posts you make, items you search/buy, tweets you twurp or email sent, you leave a footprint. The footprints you make are used to generate your online persona and silently build an online profile of you. There are many websites that are starting to do this with striking degrees of accuracy. This information that is collected can be used to target you for marketing purposes, data collection, profile building, profile scanning, DNA data collecting, analysis & observation. I, like most of you would have assumed, the trails we leave are just for marketing. However, now that I am really thinking about what could very likely will be its other uses, its easy to see how our online information can be miss used. The black-market of the future will sell real lives or invented identity for a costly fee. People in the future wanting to start over and become someone else will have the ability to do so. I believe that society as we see it now, will in 30-40 years time, be drastically different. Picture a futuristic world where entry to buildings is based on an intelligence system that analyses your human presence & matches it ti its online data on you in a matter of seconds. The online data footprints we leave are all tracked, monitored & recorded. From now I recommend you to be careful what you share. Sites like specify, intel, pipl or even a quick google search will show what information about you is accessible to the public.

Every movement we make online its tracked so the image above as an imaginative visual of you.  Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt said: Online Developments in Anonymity. However anonymous you think you are online, even by creating a pseudonym, you can be ID’d. Andrew Lewman, The executive director of the Tor Project plans to re-anonymise the web. The Tor software confuses a users web traffic by bouncing the signal to different locations, so anyone that is watching is unable to trace who you are or where you are. Lewman spoke about how important our identity online is: “The ability to be anonymous is increasingly important because it gives people control, it lets them be creative, it lets them figure out their identity and explore what they want to do, or to research topics that aren’t necessarily ‘them’ and may not want tied to their real name for perpetuity,” Aleks Krotoski, has been writing about interactivity since 1999. She has a PhD in the social psychology of relationships in online communities. She also writes articles feature pieces and opinion pieces. While browsing, I came across an article she wrote on Online Identity: Is authenticity or anonymity more important?? The article is well worth a read as she questions and quotes high authority figures in the interactive world. How To Be ‘Identity Savvy’ online & to watch what footprints you leave Statistics from CNN show that Identity Fraud is on the rise and growing since 2010 where the figure rose from 10.2 million to 13.1 million in 2013. I have formed a few useful steps in how you can protect your identity online & use online applications wisely. We don’t need to live like hermits in tinfoil, but having a degree of awareness helps.

• Use strong passwords and do not share them with anyone. A random combination of numbers, letters and punctuation over eight characters long is recommended. Do not repeat a password that is used for other accounts. If one password is leaked, at least your other passwords are different.
• Check your billing and account records carefully to detect potential identity theft early. Online banking updates almost immediately. When logging in to your online banking system, ensure that you have complete privacy.
• If your signing up to newsgroups, offers, mailing lists, use your less frequently used email address. Be careful when signing up to mailing lists – spammers use the unsubscribe button to validate addresses.
• Only share your primary email address with people you know.
• Only make online purchases from companies that have a clear privacy policy and secure payment pages. There usually obvious to spot, Paypal for instance, have a specific size, and locations on websites they appear. Using Paypal is usually a safer alternative to using your bank card details online.
• Think before you fill out online forms. Ask yourself, how much information do I need to enter into this site?
• Keep a record of what information you have given to whom.
• Be careful how much personal information you post or reveal online.
• Users who share addresses, telephone numbers, birthdays, and other personal information put themselves at a greater risk of identity theft, stalking and harassment. This includes information you post on social media.

• If you use social networking sites, adjust your privacy settings to control the amount and type of information you want to share, so that people you don’t know very well can only see certain parts of your profile.
• We all have fun on social media, checking in, taking pictures of what we are doing and sharing them, but be careful how often you do this. Out and about statuses let people know your not at home. Take this lollipop!
• Think about what information you may have online that is spread across multiple sites. Identity thieves can piece together your identity from public information piece by piece like putting together a puzzle. The footprints we leave can not be washed away.

Mario Rodriguez who is a faculty member of Communications and Media Studies Department at Stetson University gave a TED talk the 12th of April 2013 on Facebook Privacy & Identity – Exploring your digital self. He studied Facebook privacy for his dissertation and compiled alot of primary research you might find interesting. His particular emphasis on privacy is not only relevant to the job market but shows that online privacy is an essential topic for cultivating 21st century media literacy. He also discusses Social media privacy and questions our representation online.