We live in an age where the need for cyber security literacy from the average person is becoming more of a necessity. AI generated media is running rampant, leading to intricate scams or the spread of disinformation in order to leverage a person’s mistake. Spoofing video calls to mimic banks for the sake of stealing personal information or money from victims. Bots have been used at nauseam to interact with online users for engagement or harassment. All of these examples are either illegal or at best morally dubious, however the article that was read for this assignment outlines illegal actions that the everyday person commits that they could be unaware of.

Some of the examples are very obviously illegal as well as common knowledge to online users as against the law. Visiting unofficial streaming serves, torrents, recording Voids and stealing from YouTube are usually explicitly told to the public as illegal to participate in and punishable by law. People still commit most of these crimes knowingly and justify the action with the fact that the action does not physically hurt anybody but larger entities. Bullying and trolling, sharing others personal information, and faking identity fall into the category of crimes with ill intent that people know could be illegal but choose to do them anyway for their own personal reasons or vendettas. With that said, the crimes that I believe would be more accurate for a large amount of people being more ignorant of them include illegal searches on the internet, collecting information on children and using other people’s internet. All of them include an aspect of grey area that makes them trickier to deal with. Illegal searches, while usually suspicious, can stem from genuine innocent curiosity such as bomb making for scholarly study with the same applying to surveying large datasets of children for research. Lastly, the grounds for using someone else’s internet without their permission are dependent on the whim of the owner which can lead to hearsay.

References

• Slynchuk, A (2026 Jan 04) 11 illegal things you unknowingly do on the internet, Clario, https://clario.co/blog/illegal-things-you-do-online/