It is hard to imagine life today without the Internet, and all of the benefits that it brings to our business and personal lives: convenient, cheap and instant communication across time zones and national boundaries; online shopping and banking; document and data exchange without the need to ship media; collaborative working and online entertainment; and free access to more information than previous generations could ever have dreamed of. Rapid progress indeed, for a global information system that didn’t exist until the summer of 1991 when the world’s first website went online at CERN as a result of work by Tim Berners-Lee. It’s also hard to imagine life today without all of problems that the Internet has introduced: phishing attacks, cyber-bullying, data theft on a scale never before imagined, spam, distributed denial-of-service attacks, ransomware, spyware, website defacements, and so on, none of which will disappear any time soon, despite the best efforts of the myriad purveyors of security systems, or the specialist IT crime units that have been set up alongside traditional police forces throughout the world. This analysis assesses the various ways in which the Internet has changed our lives, and the problems that it has brought. It also offers suggestions and advice as to how the effects of those problems can be mitigated in the future.
