Managing Online Accounts

Many of us have online accounts and post various information to the world wide web for different reasons. I personally use a free online service to post pictures for storing, printing and sharing with my friends and family. By doing this, I am taking certain level of risk, however, it’s a risk I am willing to take in exchange for the convenience of storing and sharing my pictures, plus it’s free. However, I choose and decide owning and managing online accounts very carefully usually based on answers to what, where and why questions. What I mean is I first ask myself the reasons for creating the online accounts; if I’m convinced that I have good reasons such as it will make my life easier, then I open the account. This decision also takes into consideration that “where” aspect of my other question. I need to trust the site owner where I open my account, their reputation and also their security practices for protecting my account information. The last question that I need to address carefully is “what” information I need to post. The word “need” is very broad because we have needs for a lot of things and usually we want it all, but in this case, I suggest meeting our minimum needs to reduce our risk of identity theft. For example, when I decided to post my pictures online for the convenience of sharing, storing and printing my pictures, I was looking for convenience and easy way of managing my pictures, but that didn’t mean I was going to risk it all for this convenience. I select and post the pictures very carefully, always assuming the worst to come.

Posting pictures online for various reasons is only one way the internet has changed our lives for the better. I love using the internet in more ways that you can imagine but I use it carefully and selectively. I use it for banking, purchases, research, learn about others’ ideas, and more. I have yet to explore social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and others mainly because I don’t have any use or interest at this point, but maybe as my kids grow up, I will use them but very carefully and selectively

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