Importance of Data Security | Internet safety | Khan Academy

I'm going to make a bold prediction.

You probably don't like people stealing your identity, which allows them to steal your money or maybe tell the whole universe what you're up to, and being able to track you and your family and compromise your security.

These don't feel like good things.

And so if that is true of you, it's true of me. I don't like any of those things; I want to keep my private information private.

Then you should care about data security.

And that's what we're going to do in this unit. You're going to learn a lot about personally identifiable information. Your name is one example, but also things like your social security number or things that are indirectly personally identifiable, like your address or your phone number.

Why that's important?

And then we're going to learn the ways that people are going to try to get a hold of it and why they want to get a hold of it. Because they might want to misrepresent you or publish things about you on the internet, or control your presence on the internet, or steal money from you or from others that you care about.

And then we're going to learn about ways to protect from those. A lot of that's going to be behavior change on your part to be a little bit more vigilant, but also technology ways of keeping your data secret: encrypting your data, authentication, making sure that the person who says they are who they are are actually them.

So enjoy this unit on data security.

It isn't just interesting, which it is; it could save you a lot of money, a lot of pain, and a lot of embarrassment.