Why the Ashley Madison hack and other e-scandals are your wakeup call

Specifically, nothing that we access electronically is safe. Many people are rightly concerned about identity theft but the real threat is the information that people disclose almost willingly.  

You should consider that every site you visit, every place you post a comment, every email you send complaining about a coworker could become open season. Clients can search the Internet using your name, social media handles and your actual email address. Are they going to find anything that may be inappropriate? Can you undo that information at any time? Probably not.

The risk to reputation is real. These very public breaches of security have brought “behind closed doors” issues into the light. For every disgraced public figure, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who are dealing with their own small-time shame when an Ashley Madison situation goes viral.

If multimillion corporations can have electronic databases exposed by anonymous groups in almost elementary fashion, a small firm doesn’t stand a chance. 

While these incidents seem to affect “everyone but me”, studies show that workplaces are a popular problem area for computer/Internet misuse. So while it may not be you, it’s seems like it’s practically everyone else around you.

The electronic world we live in is can be one very scary place and you no longer have absolute control about who knows what in your life. However, you can take common sense steps including: think before you post on a public site, hit send on an email or sign up for that intriguing site out of curiosity. 

Or better explained by celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz: “When I was growing up, my mother would always say, ‘It will go on your permanent record.’ There was no ‘permanent record’…There is a permanent record today, and it’s called the Internet.”[2]