ISIQ’s Internet Privacy Campaign (3)
ISIQ stands for Institut de Securité de l’Information du Québec, and it has launched this week an Internet Privacy Campaign. They have launched a blog, produced videos, and are posting about security and privacy issues on the net. Great initiative, although everything is in french.
It can be summed up by: don’t trust everything you read on the net. don’t leave personal info. If you don’t get this, read this great quote by Douglas Adams in How to stop worrying and Learn to Love the internet
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Great quote, Heri. I would like to see more such throughtful comments on the ISIQ blog.
FYI, English videos should be also available next week (I believe but don’t take my word for granted). As for blog posts, they are currently all French for obvious reasons but it is quite possible that English writers from the ISIQ community join the club in the near future.
i am not criticizing the blog for being in french. we are in quebec after all. it is just a warning for english speaking-only people who are reading this blog.
and yes, i’ll comment on the ISIQ blog
[...] ISIQ launches internet privacy campain, which aims at educating the publich about security issues on the Internet. (June 12th) [...]
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