Here are some highlights from Day 2 at Internet Librarian 2017.
Amy Affelt (@aainfopro on Twitter) spoke about Internet Search Tips & Tricks
Her tips mainly revolved around making your activity on the web a bit more private. Some of her tips included:
- Using https://panopticlick.eff.org/ from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to see how well your web browser and add-ons protect you against online tracking techniques.
- Use web browsers in their private browsing mode (i.e., Chrome’s Incognito mode).
- Use Duck Duck Go instead of Google search, but start the search with a ! at the beginning of the search. That makes Duck Duck GO search Google, but using Duck Duck Go’s features.
- Use a VPN
- Use ad blockers and traffic blockers
- Potential border crossing smartphone handovers, asking to look at your social media accounts. Take a burner phone instead.
Bobbi Newman was up next. Some highlights from her talk included:
She defined what privacy in an online world means:
- Information collection – all that data
- Processing of that information and data
- Dissemination of that data, i.e, in order to use it or sell it
- All of this is an invasion of privacy
Bobbi mentioned that if you are tech-savvy or more well-to-do, you have a better chance at privacy. [edit by DLK – thanks Jill for pointing that out!] Minorities and the poor are subjected to more unwarranted surveillance.
The last session I attended was Frank Cervone explaining Blockchain.
It was very helpful! Some highlights:
- Blockchain is a network where transactions can be validated in a secure environment
- And they are validated forever
- It uses peer-to-peer technology (Tor networks and BitTorrent are other peer-to-peer systems) – supposedly there’s no single point of failure this way.
- Bitcoin was originally designed around cryptocurrency (i.e., BitCoin)
- It helps to embed trust rules inside each transaction, instead of doing that outside the transaction
- There are some companies/projects starting to build blockchain-enabled apps. Etherium and OpenChain are two examples.
- Problems with Blockchain – the chain grows as more transactions are added, and can eventually become unsustainable. It can also take more networking power to process, especially when those chains get longer.