On-line Dangers

On-line Dangers

In this day and age of super high-speed networking and digital communications, just about anything on any subject can be found on the Internet. Some materials, such as online libraries are helpful, some, such as student’s personal homepages are fairly useless, and some sites, such as online medical references, can be lifesaving. All these sites have a right to be on the web. However, there are also sites that could be detrimental to people, such as pornography sites, pages detailing the manufacture of illegal drugs, and instructions on how to build high explosives and other illegal devices. With the number of these types increasing daily, parents and lawmakers alike are becoming concerned for the well being of the public, specifically the younger sector of the population. This raises the issue of how safe the Internet is. With the wealth of useful information available on the Internet also comes dangerous and harmful information regarding everything from stealing cable to manufacturing high explosives, as well as child pornography and invasion of privacy. If the wrong information fell into the wrong hands, disaster could result.

One of the issues most common in the papers today is pornography available on the Internet. There are two main types of pornography available on the Internet: regular and child pornography. Regular porn is rationalized by the following argument: The idea that a TV show or lyric can transform a healthy and connected child into a dangerous monster is absurd. The same goes for the Internet. The idea that certain material on the net can cause a child to grow up to be a child molester is primarily the invention of politicians, who use it to frighten and rally. Religious groups who use it to teach belief to the young, and journalists, who use it to regain their once powerful position in American society. The Internet should be treated with respect, and used with responsibility, just like any other form of media. This type of porno should be allowed on the net, but all sites should require a password of some kind. However, the other type of pornography, child porn, is much more dangerous as well as illegal. This type of pornography often involves people that are willing to spend great amounts of time, money, and energy to gradually seduce their targets, as well as people that immediately engage in sexua...

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... victim. Fraudulent sellers use these various on-line services to promote bogus stock offerings, credit repair services, and other far fetched ideas or offers. More chances for Internet scam artists to claim victims can be found in the on-line classified advertising. No matter where you read these, you are likely to find some that are false, such as ads promoting “miracle” weight loss products and programs. A good way to avoid being ripped off by these scams is to use your common sense: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

In the digital age, we are offered a wide variety of conveniences and services through the Internet. Even though most of these can be useful, there are many evils out there in the digital world. Although there is probably no way we can ever make the Internet one hundred percent safe, we can use our good judgement to keep ourselves out of harms way. This includes knowing the tip-offs for online scams, never giving your credit card numbers out to sources that you don’t trust, and most importantly, monitoring your child when he or she is on the computer. It is up to the Internet user to keep themselves safe from the dangers that lurk on-line.