Expert warns that the internet can physically harm

Caption: Cecil Goldstein

By MATTHEW VARI

Sunday, July 20, 2014 (Sunday Chronicle, PNG)

SPEAKING at the launch of the new ICIT PNG journal, Director of CIGOLD Cybersecurity and Internet Training and Vice Chairman of the ITI Center for Advanced Internet Studies (ICIT), Cecil Goldstein warned that the internet has evolved to a point that it was now physically harming its users.

With 30 years experience in the IT industry, Goldstein said that with Papua New Guinea now one of the fastest growing users of the internet in the region and because of its infancy in its use, many dangers of the web were not properly understood.

“The internet will continue to evolve in PNG and the idea of the center (ICIT) is to try and identify those areas and help in those developments,” Goldstein said.

“We talk about the internet in its positive terms, but we must also talk about the internet and its danger in the sinister things that occur in it.”

“Cyber crime at one point was really removed from the individual where you could steal money or identity from a person which was personal but by a large it was not personal.”

“It wasn’t like a crime where you walk onto the street and someone whacks you on the head, but over the last year or so we have stared to see things that now it can be said that the internet is hurting people.”

He said that cyber stalking, cyber bullying, was luring people, particularly the young, to do terrible things to an extent even commit suicide.

“This is driven through activities over the internet; their engagement over the internet drives them to a point of exerting physical harm,” he said.

“Stalking over the net can lead to eventual physical stalking as the net has become a very real part of our lives.”

“The dangers as well as how we expose ourselves- which we do very very recklessly at some times.”

He gave an example of uploading a picture on facebook where users do not stop and think how or who is going to view that.

“Are our privacy settings set to restrict who can view it, and is it going to be viewed by friends of friends of friend,” Goldstein pointed out.

“And who really are my friends, are they friends or are they just people I accepted because I wanted to have huge number to boast about.”

“We have to be careful about what we do on the internet and realize theses implications impacts that has on people”