Gmail warning
Timely warning for students
Today my students received a timely warning on personal security on the internet. In class we have created Gmail accounts then gone onto create iGoogle personalised home pages. They have created del.icio.us accounts and signatures for the Gmail email accounts. One task required them to email all of their class mates and their lecturer (me) and send a link to their del.icio.us accounts. This was as way of all students getting each others contacts and del.icio.us links.
As always in these sort of classes I go over security, guarding your personal information on the internet, logging in and our procedures and student code of conduct and internet usage policies that they have all signed and agreed to at the beginning of term.
On Thursday several students and myself received an email full of swearing and sounding very upset at the rest of the students in the class from one of the other students. I spoke to this student to ask if they were having trouble with the other class mates? No and the student when shown the email knew nothing about it. On further investigation we found the student was not at TAFE on Thursday and when going through the history on the PC where the email originated we found that the browser automatically signed into his Gmail account. Now after this episode all the students in the class Sign in and Sign out of their Google accounts. Just because a browser is closed and internet connection is also closed does not mean your account is also closed especially if you have selected to ”Remember me on this computer” then someone else can come along and log into your accounts. Beware.
Ouch!!!!
I have had all of our training labs at work refresh profile and blow away any changes after a restart – which is a condition of use. But then, dont need to supervise staff to do that. On another note -had staff do same thing before – to all staff at uni – bigger ouch i think
This should be in the standard procedure. It should be part of the policy and education on maintaining your personal information. If it’s a shared computer you logoff on the site concerned.
Hi Frances,
Security is such a BIG issue. So good to have some real life examples to share. I will put a link to this article in my blog and point some of my colleagues to it.
Thansk,
Alex
Hi All
Thanks for the comments , it seems such a small thing to sign out of an account but don’t do it and any private information is no longer private.
Frances
It’s a very important thing especially for internet newbies. Often at my office I have to tell this to my colleagues who are new to internet. Thanks for sharing this information and making people aware about it.
Thank you very much. In BD people are not aware about it. They just simply close their browser without sign out. Well, this post will help to aware them …