Negative Impacts of IT

 Negative Impact of IT 

In this Blog I will cover five different topics of the negative impacts that IT has. They are Hacking, Cyberbullying, Spam, Denial of Service and Privacy issues. I will write about what they are and how people can be affected by them. 

IT has many negative impacts to society, one of the main issues is hacking. Hacking means when someone enters someone else’s account, or network or computer etc without their permission.  Hackers do this to access your personal data In which they can do many things with, this includes selling on your data to scammers, hacking into your personal bank, taking over your devices or give your devices viruses. This can be done through a user clicking on a dodgy email from the hacker or receiving calls and handing out your personal information to them. Hackers often target those who are elderly or who are more vulnerable to online crimes, they target them because the elderly community often don’t know about these new ways of online crime and they are more open to giving their private details out. This has extremely negative impacts on society because everyday people are losing more and more money to scams and hackers and it creates fear for everyone who uses the internet. Another example of hacking is identity theft, this is when a hacker steals your personal information like your name, National Insurance Number, banking details etc to commit crimes online. They can use your bank details to buy illegal items or use for their personal things. They can also use your identity to make new bank accounts and other accounts and use them for illegal transactions. 

Cyberbullying is fairly new and it is on the rise. Cyberbullying means using social media or an online platform to harass and bully someone. It can mean that someone uses the internet to stalk you or to cause abuse or harm to you. People that do this often use social media to hide themselves and not be known to the person they are causing harm to. They also use it because it is easier than confrontation and also much quicker as a post can take just seconds. Cyberbullying can also mean school pupils bullying another pupil over group chats or through social media posts. The effects that cyberbullying can have are very extreme and are commonly things like depression and anxiety. It can also affect how people are in a social setting, meaning how they present or talk to others around them. Cyberbullying can also cause people to want to stay inside and not leave their houses often out of worry, and also cause people to lose sleep. In extreme cases it can lead to people suffering from extreme depression which can lead to self-harm and some to suicide. For some cyberbullying can be worse than “traditional” face to face bullying. This is because cyberbullying can be done anonymously, which means that the victim doesn’t know who is trying to distress them, meaning they can’t fight back against whoever it is. Furthermore, bullies who post stuff on social media often share it to people who are close to the victim like friends or family. This can make the victim feel helpless and scared. 

Spam is another negative impact that is getting worse everyday. It is basically  messages or emails which often include adverts for different things. However, some Spam messages have hidden links which are very dangerous, they can include things which can damage your laptop or phone and add a virus to it or slow it down.  These are less common though and the more common ones are messages or emails that advertise products or a company. They use images and texts that make you want to click on them and sign you up to whatever they offer, this lets them get access to your email or phone number which means you’ll get more and more of theses messages or even phone calls. Phone calls are another type of spam which involve people receiving calls randomly about different things a company can offer them or in some cases insurance fraud. Some people often receive multiple calls a day from these callers all asking different information. This is becoming an issue which only gets worse everyday. It leads to people receiving hundreds of messages and emails which can become dangerous and cause risks to peoples private information. 

Another negative impact of IT is Denial of Service (DOS). DOS means hacking a computer or website and forcing so many requests or data that it will stop working. It can cause a website to crash or slow down or not work properly. Hackers often target companies to do this to as a way of making them lose money and customers. It can make them lose money because of sales and orders. People who do these types of attacks are mostly large groups of hackers as it requires a lot of people to take a big companies website down. An example of DOS is in 2014 when a group of hackers took down PlayStation and made all of its servers and networks not work for two days. This made the company lose a huge amount of money. 

Lastly I will talk about the privacy issues that we face with IT. IT has a lot of different ways it can keep information about you, this is through things like the websites you use or your contact info. However, it can also be dangerous because we are not always sure how much of our information and data is actually collected. This is where the problem of privacy comes in. Some websites which are often not safe collect more things than they actually should. This can be very dangerous as we don’t know what happens with our personal data afterwards and we don’t know how long they keep it for. If it is a very dangerous website they can use your details to sell to criminals who can use it for crimes like I mentioned in the hacking section. Another problem is that if a company or a business which has your personal information faces an attack, all your personal information could be at risk. This is the problem that everyone faces and that is how much data should we really be giving out to websites and companies.