How safe is your identity?
There have been a lot of stories about identity theft and computer security in the news over the past few years, but can computer security advance quickly enough to protect us from cyber-criminals? Facebook has received a lot of attention about how it manages user's personal data and whether it is as clear as it should be when it makes important updates to the site. If you use Facebook, do you remember being informed that any photograph of you is subject to Facial Recognition software that can automatically recognise you? The same software has been shown to have a 31% success rate at recognising faces captured on a webcam. This may seem like an unwanted and intrusive move by Facebook but a far more serious threat to personal data is your choice of password for emails, bank details or mobile phone account. If you have any of the following for your passwords, there is little point having a password at all: password, 123456 or 1234. No matter how complicated the encryption algorithms that are used to protect your data, if your password can easily be guessed it is like leaving your keys in the most complicated lock built.
Facebook Turns On Facial Recognition For Tagging By Default
If you have a bunch of tag-happy Facebook friends, you may want to read this. Facebook has been rolling out a facial recognition feature that makes it easier to tag friends in snaps, and it has introduced this feature as a default setting. We first heard about Tag Suggestions back in December. The feature basically means that whenever you're offered the chance to tag groups of your friends in an album, Facebook will use its facial recognition technology to group similar faces together and automatically suggest the friend you should tag them with. The option has been rolling out to international users over the past few months, and according to a report from Sophos, the social networking site has been making the facial recognition feature a default setting. Facebook explained the rollout in a post on Tuesday.
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http://mashable.com/2011/06/07/facebook-tag-suggestions/
How safe is your password?
Do you use one of the most common codes? These are currently in the top five passwords in use online. If you use one of these for anything - email, banking, social media - you may as well not have a password at all.
1. password
2. 123456
3. 12345678
4. 1234
5. pussy
Passwords have never been that secure. Sentries of old might have considered the requirement for someone to whisper the word "Methuselah" to get past a checkpoint to be pretty damn stringent, but as soon as "Methuselah" was forgotten or passed on (deliberately or inadvertently), they may as well have abandoned the checkpoint and put up a sign saying: "Come on in." Despite this, the almost laughably antiquated system of password protection has persisted in the internet age, securing our finances, our personal details, and those of slaughter-happy characters we've created in games such as World of Warcraft. These sequences of letters are usually recognisable words that are convenient, easy to remember and, we imagine, impossible to guess. After all, we came up with them unprompted, we didn't write them down, and didn't reveal them to anyone else. But we're spectacularly unimaginative in our choice of passwords, and despite constant reminders that this represents a security risk, we blithely carry on using them, reassuring ourselves that we haven't been scammed thus far. But that's a bit like wandering blindfolded around busy town centres and saying: "Well, I haven't been hit by a car yet." But passwords will persist, not least because we're hugely resistant to anything more complex.
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