Lack of Cyber Wellness a "dangerous matter"

According to the Cyber Wellness Task Force (CWTF) report in 2004, cyber wellness is: "The positive well-being of Internet users and a healthy cyber culture for the Internet community.

The Internet has been infamous for being a breeding ground for nefarious deeds and a tricky ground to set legislation for. Issues like cyber-bullying, hacking, phishing, scamming, illegal downloading challenges human morality and, in a way, challenges users to act righteously.

Notably, most users assume that they are anonymous when they use the internet. Thus they would have less responsibility and respect when doing things online, and some freely express their opinions. This leads to racial discrimination, cyber-bullying and "flaming", the act of expressing angry comments towards other people.

Education could be done more on this field to correct the situation, such as reminding Internet users that even on the Internet, people have emotions. Written abuse is a powerful way of inciting emotions, so comments on blogs, forums and online games could be thought out more carefully before being expressed. Human morality should be emphasized, since enforcement of any law could prove tricky, due to huge size of issues created daily.

Next, the protection of Internet users, although extensive, could still prove inadequate as new online threats are created everyday. These threats include: viruses, phishing, spyware and hacking. Part of this issue lies with the ignorance of threats ubiquitous throughout the Internet, even among teenagers. This threats have more implications on the young and old, since access to these information takes one a lot of time to read up.

Nowadays, it is becoming easy for a non tech-savvy user to pose threats to other users, due to software and websites which teach people to. Keylogging is especially one common threat that is very easy to implement, even for those with no experience. Spam e-mails these days contain threats from the moment users open the email, and thus users who are ignorant about such issues will bear the brunt of the damage.

Measures include: awareness of which websites are real (against phishing), installing anti-virus, anti-spyware and other software to protect against complicated threats. Education is a key element to preventing legitimate users from facing these issues which may "turn them to the other side". Human morality could be emphasized here, yet again, as legislation could do little against threats of such huge extent.

Finally, Intellectual Property (IP) is an extremely tricky situation to handle. Many companies have tried unsuccessfully to make sure that creative content sold in markets do not get posted on the Internet for free downloading. Apparently, this is still a grey area for most users. Many people do not want to buy things which they can get for free off the Internet, unless it's for personal reasons like support for the pop idol etc.

Also, this steps on the area of human psychology, where people would not like a disadvantage on the things they could potentially own. Influence from acquaintances and peers play a part as well. Additionally, IP, to most people, is a largely obscure concept. This is due in part to the relative small creative industry. As little people work in that industry, few among thousands would fully comprehend the impact that infringement of IP does.

The truth is grim too. Nowadays, probably most of the materials available online are either infringing on IP or contains plagiarism. This issue today spans across several individual industries like the television, song and movie industries. As there are too many things that have to be done, like re-shifting the human psychology to recognize IP over personal benefit, this issue is not easily resolved.

In conclusion, as Singapore's and worldwide usage of the Internet increases, we will face increasingly complex issues about cyber wellness. New threats will surface over time, but one fundamental concept should be remembered when we go online, regardless of the purpose.

And that is: We are still human even when we are online.

By Kwee Peng