Are We Misusing the Internet?

The World Wide Web (WWW) or the Internet has revolutionized the whole world. It would be difficult… very difficult, if not impossible to imagine existence without the Internet. It has become an indifferentiable part of our daily lives. The Internet today is perhaps a quarter of a century old and day-by-day its uses is increasing exponentially.
The internet holds a huge amount of data as in 2009 it was estimated that there are more than 500 billion Gigabytes digital contents on the internet.

According to an article from theguardian.com, “If the world’s rapidly expanding digital content were printed and bound into books it would form a stack that would stretch from Earth to Pluto 10 times.”

This was all about 2009, now it’s 2019… No, I won’t say anything. You can imagine yourself.
According to a report,

How fast!
Internet was started for good but now the purposes have been redefined and it’s getting misused to its maximum extent. We’ve forgotten why it was invented and started misusing it.

Are We Really Misusing the Internet?

Today, the internet has become a breeding ground for all illegal activities. The unlimited information access has given insights for burglaries, terrorist attacks, kidnappings and many other types of crime.

Before the internet, you had to pay for buying any movie or album. But the internet has come with the word ‘piracy’, which includes downloading or disturbing any media files (Movies, Music, etc.), applications without the owner’s consent. Means you can download any latest movies or album for free. Saddening is that people don’t even realize that downloading any copyrighted pieces of stuff free from anywhere is illegal.
Day-by-day computer viruses are becoming more aggressive, that they could even shut down the whole economy. All sensitive data like medical records, financial records, security records, criminal records, educational records, etc. are getting stored on the cloud storages and a well-designed computer virus can ruin everything.

Latest, on 12th May 2017, is ‘WannaCry Ransomware’ attack which influenced… better to say ruined more than 2 million computers in over 150 countries.

Once, I Googled for a Laptop, after that every website I visited were showing ads related to Laptops.

Seriously, try this.

We think that our search queries are private… hell NO. If it was so then how did they start showing ads related to your search queries? Hackers easily access these pieces of information and commit fraud and identity theft.
When I was 12 years old, a website that I visited showed, “You must be at least 13 years old to signup” and you know what I changed my birth year and told them that I’m 15. Seriously, on the internet, is there any concrete way to verify the age of a visitor? A big NO.

Pornographic materials are the most prominent because children are most likely to stumble upon these types of websites. So, preventing children from accessing materials which they don’t belong to should be our major concern.
The contents which are especially for the year 2017, will it be of any use in the year 2018? No. Then how will it be removed? No way. The internet is also full of fake and fraud contents. So, this way you can imagine that by every passing year how much internet-waste will be created. Then controlling it should also be our major concern.
Then there comes the biggest internet culprit – Social Media and Instant Messaging Platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp and all. These were created for our betterment the creators of these platforms would have never thought that it’d be misused this way as of now.

Like, most of the youngsters and even teenagers are wasting their valuable times on these platforms. According to me, the same social media can be used as a knowledge hub and one can gain huge knowledge from these platforms.

Final Words

By each passing day, we hear news of cyber-bullying, credit card information theft, movie leak before its release and blah blah blah. So, whom to blame for this, the creators or the users? I guess, the users.
We need to understand these things and not waste our valuable time for some useless kinds of stuff instead gain some worthy knowledge. We should learn to protect our financial and all other personal details from someone misusing or taking advantage of it.