There is a false sense of security on the Internet. We all want to think that our personal information is safe and secure when it isn’t.

With hacks becoming more and more common, companies are left paying off millions or even billions of dollars to their customers, depending on the severity of the attack.

The recent Target hacker attack that affected 110 million customers, spanning from the last week of November to the second week of December, came at great expense to the company, banks and credit card unions around the nation.

Kickstarter was also recently hacked, allowing hackers access to basic information like customer e-mails, phone numbers, mailing addresses and encrypted passwords. Although this is still a serious rupture for its security system, one thing that Kickstarter’s CO-founder Yancey Strickler wanted to get across was that the company does not save or have records of full credit card numbers for each account.

A study done in 2012 by Ponemon Research took 583 U.S. companies and asked how many of them have had some sort of data breach, hack or security problem in the past year. Of those 583, 90 percent answered yes. Within the past year their computer systems had been attacked at least once.

The hackers in these instances are getting our information when it is sold between companies. Before checking out a purchase online, we are regularly asked to agree to the given page’s term of conditions. Most of us never read them. Somewhere in that laborious document of long legal words and terms we don’t understand, it says that we agree for that company to exchange or sell our information among other companies who have similar products or commodities.

Our lack of patience to read these terms is one reason we have to blame ourselves for these assaults on our personal data. For every other reason, we have to point the finger at the handlers—the companies themselves.

Professor Mark Manulis from the University of Surrey in the UK has been studying these outbreaks and says, “If the information is sufficiently protected, then it does not matter whether it is transmitted through hostile or foreign networks.” This means that the reason companies are having these incidents are because they are trading or selling our information without the proper encrypted protection.

We as people have to become more aware that the Internet is not as safe as we would like to think. As much as we love shopping online, people want your money and that new pair of shoes just as much as you do. These companies need to realize that they need to appropriate new rules and ethics concerning how they conduct business with our sensitive material.

We are the most technologically-advanced generation of all time. With the expertise we have in this field, we need to practice more common sense.

braber@mavs.coloradomesa.edu