Reflection
Have you ever…shared your login?
Think of a time you shared your login with another person. How did you communicate your login details? What could your friend access with your login? On a scale of 1 to 10, how risky was your decision to share your details? Is it legally or ethically OK to share login credentials to let somebody use your account? Do services offer their own definitions of acceptable and unacceptable forms of account sharing?
Key concept
Personalized online experiences
This episode revealed that the personalized experience offered to users of technology comes with a cost: sharing data about yourself. You learned that your activities online—such as the information you type, the links you click, the amount of time you spend on a particular page—enable websites to target information to you.
Websites track different types of user data. Some of it can be used to identify an individual—known as personally identifiable information, or PII—and some of it can’t. PII includes information such as your full name, your home address, your email address, or your date of birth. Non-PII is data that can’t be used to identify a person, and includes device IDs, IP addresses, and cookies. There’s also a gray area—would you consider your username PII?
There’s plenty of other information you share—sometimes publicly. Think about posting to a social network. You might be tagged in a photo, along with location. That data, along with less-personal information such as who your friends are, and the text of your posts, becomes a part of the digital trail you leave as you move around online.
Reflect:
Have you received targeted advertising or personalized search results?
Try this experiment.
Enter some terms into a search engine. Do you see evidence of the search engine using your online behavior to personalize your search results?
Try having a friend enter the same search terms. Do they see the same results?
What about when you sign in to a service? What personal information does the website store about you?
What assurances does the service provide about how your PII data will be used, stored and protected?
Can you find the site’s privacy policy, and how easy is it to read?
Key concept
Computing systems
The episode also introduced the concept of a computer network made up of numerous devices, each running software with inputs and outputs. Networks enable their connected devices to exchange data using wired or wireless links. Most networks don’t connect all their component devices directly; they route messages through multiple links to move information from a sender to a recipient.
Reflect:
Think about a local network, such as your school or home.
What types of devices make up that network?
Which of those devices connect to the internet?
How do they connect to each other?
Draw a diagram to represent the network.
Explore further
The internet and the World Wide Web
The internet is a computer network made up of many individual computing devices—computers, routers, switches, and more—and the software that enables it to function. In fact, the internet is a network of networks. Its function is to interconnect many networks with a common communication system, called a protocol. Internetwork communication was a novel concept in the days of independent, proprietary networks.
The internet began as a military research project, called ARPANET, in 1969 and became a global commercial network in the 1990s. Today it connects billions of users around the world.
It’s easy to confuse the internet and the World Wide Web. When you use a browser to visit a site like Apple.com, you’re on the web. The web consists of millions of resources, each identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), which look like “https://apple.com.” When you click a link that opens a different page, you’re asking your browser to go to a different URL that points to that page.
You can think about the internet as a railroad system and the World Wide Web as a type of train. Can you think of any other types of “trains” that use the internet?
Research this:
Consider the internet.
Who owns the internet?
Why was it developed and how many connected devices did it initially support?
Approximately how many devices does the internet connect now?
