With so much of our lives spent online and our personal information used everywhere we have an account, getting hacked can be a catastrophic and costly experience for anyone. Not only is there the inconvenience of losing access to your social-media accounts, contacts, email, photos or other data, your accounts can be used by others to commit crimes or do other ghastly things online and have it look like you. Your personal or professional...

  “When we change the way we communicate, we change society” (Clay Shirky) “Social media allows us to behave in ways that we are hardwired for in the first place – as humans. We can get frank recommendations from other humans instead of from faceless companies.” (Francois Gossieaux)   Clay Shirky said it best with the title of his book Here Comes Everybody. In the book, Shirky outlines the mass...

  “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” (Socrates) “It is our moral duty to share the scientific, intellectual, spiritual and creative wisdom of man with all of humanity so that every single person on the planet has the same opportunity to explore, expand, become enlightened by, or simply to experience, the collective gifts of humankind.” (JPS)   All knowledge, all science, all education and even all creative...

  “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” (Potter Stewart) “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” (John Stuart Mill)   We now live in a world connected through the Internet, social-media and other technologies where the principles of democracy, freedom of speech,...

   “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” (Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google)     So here we go again. People whining about not being able to pretend they are someone else, or no one else online, by using pseudonyms. I should be clear right from the start. I believe that misrepresenting your “identity” (yes a philosophical minefield) is not only...