“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, may be you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”, said Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO. Most of us do not think about privacy while using technologies to communicate about us and those around us, until we meet with violation of our privacy. It would often be too late by that time. Internet with its near infinite memory would be having much more information about us that we would want it to.
Increasing use of technologies like social network and pervasive nature of digital recording tools combined with gender difference make women vulnerable to privacy violation. Unfortunately their awareness on tools and practices to ensure safety and security is also limited. It is with this understanding, we decided to hold a program on safe and effective use of web for women. It was also decided that it will be a program ‘for women by women’. We all really got thrilled about this, because it was for the first time we were conducting something of that kind. But the following days revealed that this wasn’t easy as it appeared.
Holding the workshop involved us learning more about the issue. Each of us (Indu, Jinu, Nishi, Sairath) put forward a plethora of suggestions and reaching consensus was really a hassle. Sometimes these discussions went to the extent that it would put country to shame. However, we came up with an informative syllabus having contemporary relevance.
We scheduled the first workshop at Govt. Women's College, Vazhuthacaud from 11 to 13th Nov 2013. Mr Sreejith, Asst. Professor, Statistics Dept, Govt. College for women, Vazhuthacaud, and he assisted us in completing all the official formalities and made necessary arrangements.
11th November 2013
Even though we were a little bit tensed (our first event), everything went well as we planned. The program started off with an inauguration in the morning of Nov 11th at 10am in Womens College auditorium.
A welcome speech was delivered by Mr Sreejith V, Assistant Professor of Womens College. This was followed by an Inaugural address and subsequent lighting up of the lamp by the Principal Dr. A Mary Dorothy. Dr. Susha Janardhanan, consultant counsellor of Loyola college of social science, was the Chief Guest for our program. The chief guest then addressed the 500 students who participated for the awareness seminar.
Following the inagural session, Nishi Jayaraj, SPACE, gave a lecture on evolution of communication technology and challenges of new technology. Session also touched on ideas of identity and anonymity. Program concluded with a vote of thanks by Indu Reghunath.
In the following days, we conducted a hands on session for 20 selected students with a view to groom them as master trainers.
As an introduction, working of Internet was explained to them, in detail through interactive videos. Exploring the mysterious black box, computer cabinet (CPU), was a whole new enthralling experience for our students. Most of them had not seen internal parts of the computer so closely before. We could really feel the happiness in their eyes when they separated and later assembled different parts of CPU.
Next session was on search engine. Participants were introduced to searching techniques. Advanced searching facilities were shown to students. They really got excited when slight modification of query led them to the accurate results. Duck Duck Go search engine was introduced, a privacy sensitive search facility. We also discussed how personalised search results can limit our exploration by constraining our universe.
All the 20 students were really talented in various sectors and most of them had their own perspective about what was happening around them. We introduced “Wordpress - a blogging platform” and they happily started to publish on the blog, what they really felt like telling the world. Within a short span of time most of them came up with great blogs that dealt with fuming issues faced by women these days. We also discussed about anonymity in this context. (include links to blog)
We asked these students for what purpose, they are using Internet mostly. As we anticipated majority of them were using it for accessing social networking sites. They see these media as a fun way to chat with friends, post pictures and keep up with news and hence stay updated. We took this discussion to show them the other side, privacy. They were unaware that, by posting intimate details of their movements, moods, holidays and new purchases, they are making themselves vulnerable to what is increasingly referred to as cyber attack. They never considered the possibility of themselves being the victim of such attacks though the chances are really high. We also discussed how accumulation of information by companies behind these websites can harm us.
We introduced various privacy features on web browsers and on social networking sites that they should use. They were also shown how with a weak privacy setting they are not only putting themselves at risk but also their friends.
Unlike a conventional wind up session, in order to make it more interesting we asked one among the participant to come forward and login to her wordpress account. And she logged in by typing the username and password. To everyone’s surprise, we showed all the credentials including her password in a separate file. All of them were really shocked and eager to know how this happened. Thus we introduced them to ‘Key logger - A tool to log the keys struck on keyboard’ and its devastating impacts on privacy.
There were couple of more topics that we wanted to cover. We were forced to drop them as sessions did not go as fast as we thought them to be.
