Directions : Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below them. Certain words are given in bold to help you locate them while answering some of the questions Never was a world changing technology named more aptly than the ‘World Wide Web’, and the aptness was proved again with Facebook and its privacyslaughtering shenanigans smattering like slime on the looking glass of news of recent days.The benefits of unprecedented connectivity come with vulnerability to manipulation and exploitation, as exposed in Facebook’s data misuse scandal involving the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Global Internet users – numbering over four billion in 2018 – face illegal data harvesters, identity thieves, privacy violators and varieties of cheats prowling the information pathways we travel daily, the broadband journeys intertwining, interconnecting in the increasing online daily life of the mundane world.

What a world! This global village with happy online ‘magic’ that we take for granted, where oceans are bridged with a mouse click, where more information is created and shared than ever before in history and more work done through intercontinental networking of colleagues unseen in flesh and blood; but this magical wonderland coming with the dark world of ghoulish malwares and virulent virusconjuring sorcerers, the monster spiders of ecommerce luring unwary victims into perilous parlors, and sometimes, in comeuppance times, the spider getting caught in its own mesh – like Facebook and its recent woes. 

Addictive so-called ‘social media’ and dependency on Internet 24/7 were not on the horizon among us pioneering Internet-using journalists when the term ‘World Wide Web’ entered daily usage circa 1994. Those were days when Mumbai had about three Internet-connected computers, and the word ‘email’ was not yet the oxygen of daily communication across the planet. Ironically now when the World Wide Web dominates our lives, we do not even need to key in ‘www’ to enter 1.7 billion existing websites (2,738 websites in 1994). But as stakes increase in the Internet El Dorado that churns out billionaires like Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, cheats and their tricks increase Facebook’s recent troubles came as no surprise, not if you maintain a sneak-cheat list of personally banned websites like I do. European laws demand publishers ask for permission to install cookies, but the slithery sneak-cheats not only sneak in but hide in computers. They are exposed when I often clear my browser of cookies and site data (In a chrome browser, click on ‘settings’ > ‘advanced settings’ > ‘privacy’ > ‘content settings’ > ‘Cookies and site data’> ‘Remove All’.) The cookie box should clear after clicking ‘Remove All’, except for the browser data. But cookies of cheating websites sneakily linger, like a perverted visitor who does not go when bidden but hides under the bed to spy. These sneaky cheats store their spyware in text files that I have to find and delete from hard drives, using as search word the name of the sneak website. 

The Internet too has its dark side, like other things of life. It makes sense to make best use of the most beneficial technological revolution of our times, while taking precautions to not fall into webs of thieves. But a beneficial online life needs also avoiding self-created traps of paranoia. The foundations of the Internet are rooted in freedom, and whatever it takes is worth the effort to be free.