Digital India Week at Dr. V N Bedekar Institute of Management Studies, Thane

Digital India Week is being celebrated from July 1-7 as per the recent announcement by our honourable Prime Minister Mr Modi. The vision of this program aimed at inclusive growth in area of electronic services, products, manufacturing and the job opportunities. 

 

No doubt what all has been said and aimed is going to benefit our country in a big way. But these are just the positive sides of it. Like they say, “Everything comes at some Cost” or “Nothing comes for free”, even this digital technology has a flip side.

 

When whole India was celebrating the Digital India Week, Dr V N Bedekar Institute of Management too was no exception. On the 7th July 2015, we had a guest lecture on the cyber security by Mr Ajitabh Dutta, CEO, Simplicity Communications. During this session we discovered all the possible hazards of the digital technology. 

 

The session started with the recent digital frauds and the accidents. The most recent being, worker was killed by the Terminator, the robot at the Volkswagen plant in Germany. 

 

Today we are inclined towards uploading our data on clouds so that we can save the space and we can access it from anywhere and anytime. But we exactly do not know where is that data stored, how safe is it. Secondly, every single picture we upload on the social networking sites, stays with the server. We may delete it from our profiles but its never out of the server. Somebody in future may retrieve those pictures and may misuse them. 

 

With the advent of the technology, people have multiple identities such making it even more than population. There is no privacy, specially on the social networking sites. The more we expose our life to social media, more we are getting exposed to dangers.

These threats can be limited by changing our passwords frequently, though it does not guarantee no risk but the probability of risk is reduced. The most common thing we do is that we keep our passwords same for ages. And on top of it, the passwords are usually associated with our names, birthdates. If we can avoid this then we can have safer Digital (Virtual) Life.

 

The solution to all this is our attitude. We today have reactive approach towards the threats. Reactive attitude means we act on the problems only after it has caused the damage. So to be safe and secure we need to be proactive. We should be able to foresee and amend well in advance in order to be safe. 

 

Even the government can play a vital role in the digital security. There should be stricter laws and regulations. The government should arrange educational and awareness campaigns and proper and adequate financing for the research and development of the cyber security.

 

So the bottom line of the session was, apart from all these things, if we can move from  FOMO (Fear of Missing out) to JOMO (Joy of Missing Out), then we can have safest and yet happy life.

 

 

Source: Aditya Shrirang Khairnar, click4college Specialist