Warning: Computers steal morals

Today almost every person knows how to use a computer and most likely has one of their own. Computers are used for business and personal reasons. The amount of information that we keep on a single computer is incredible. A outsider delving into someone's personal files can learn a great deal about the owner of that computer. We save documents and our favorite websites to our computers, but the computer automatically saves large amounts of other information, that we may or may not know about. Our entire history of which websites we have visited is saved to our computer! Some programs will even save our instant messaging chat logs with other people! With just one connection to the internet, all of this information is exposed to the rest of the world.

If you can imagine your computer as a house and the internet is a large city full of houses and businesses, how different is the cyber world to the real world we live in? Everyone has a lock on their front door, but is there a lock on the back door? If there is does it always stay locked? A personal computer has a lock on it; you have user names and passwords, but normally there is also a less protected back door. It is the entrance that is rarely used and less known about; an entrance that normally comes through the internet. Each business also has different levels of security and some are harder to break into and steal from than others. This is the same online, a website might have different levels of security and some businesses might not even display themselves to the public. However, with some effort anyone can find where these locations are and even try to break in to them.

So, if computers are so similar in our society to a person's house or business, what gives us the right to try to treat them differently? So often people use computers as a screen, they realize that people can't see them and feel they can act differently than they would in the real world. They gain confidence in chat rooms and take on a different persona, possibly becoming abusive or lewd, they steal because it is so easy, everyone's doing it and there are no apparent consequences. How different is illegally downloading a $300 piece of software from walking in to the store, picking up the box containing the same software and walking out without paying? The act of spreading a computer virus is the same as vandalizing another person's house. Do we really just throw out our morals because we can't be seen? Or is it because we can't see the effects we have on other people? Or is it because we actually don't have any morals, but we feel pressured by society to act in a certain way?

The next time you download something illegaly from the internet, perhaps you should compare what you are doing in the cyber world to what you would do in the real world.

Inspiration:
The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll