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Going online without understanding the basics of how the internet works is like getting behind the wheel without knowing the road rules: you might still get where you’re going, but you could be a danger to yourself and those around you.
Using the internet is now a daily activity for most Australians. Yet, the number of people who actually understand the internet’s mechanics is small. Government and schools do work to promote cyber security and cyber safety, but the message is still not getting widespread attention.
Ultimately there is only so much that government or businesses can do to keep us safe online. At a certain point, we need to take personal responsibility and educate ourselves about how to use the internet safely.
http://theconversation.com/we-need-to-take-responsibility-for-our-own-safety-online-38368
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Tuesday March 17 2015, @06:54PM
At the end of the day, everyone needs to take responsibility for their own safety, period. We are all adults, right? Right?
Yes, responsibility is hard, I know that. Life is hard. But are you really asking other people to take responsibility for YOUR safety?
This sort of falls into the same "controversial" area as topics like "You were asking to be raped wearing revealing clothing walking around at night" "Stop blaming the victim you victim blamer!". Look, forget about about assigning blame or finger pointing. Let's say that doing foo would have prevented bad thing bar from happening to you. But you didn't do foo, so bar happened to you. Sure, you can come up with all sorts of reasons why it's not your fault ("No one told me!" "But YOU'RE supposed to stop me from being stupid"), but the milk has already been split, so to speak.
Here's another example: suppose you have a hair dryer that doesn't have the "Don't immerse in bath" warning label. If you know that electricity+water is bad and you have good judgement, then you can avoid dying. If you lack either or both, then you die. Assuming we are in America, your relatives would then sue the manufacturer for not putting the label on the hair dryer (pushing responsibility onto the manufacturer). But guess what? You're still dead. Had you taken responsibility for your own safety by educating yourself and making sound judgements, you would be alive. Fancy that.
tl;dr Finger pointing only works if you still have fingers.
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