5G makes your internet fast but may double the chance of getting cancer!!

As 5G cellular network tech looms, conventional wisdom dictates that cell phone radiation is more or less safe or less safe for humans.

But writing for the widely respected magazine Scientific American, University of California, Berkeley, public health researcher Joel Moskowitz argues that we don’t yet understand the risks — and that more study is necessary before we roll out 5G infrastructure.

Moskowitz’s main concern: there just isn’t any research on the health effects of 5G. But he also points to a swathe of studies a swathe of studies that suggest that the existing standards 2G and 3G are more dangerous than generally believed.

“Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation,” he wrote in SciAm. “These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.”

It’s hard enough to quantify the health effects of things that have already been deployed, nevermind an upcoming technology. But in SciAm, Moskowitz argues that regulators should listen to the 250 doctors and scientists who recently signed the 5G appeal, a petition for a moratorium on public rollout of the tech until the health implications are better understood.

“As a society, should we invest hundreds of billions of dollars deploying 5G, a cellular technology that requires the installation of 800,000 or more new cell antenna sites in the U.S. close to where we live, work and play?” he asked. “Instead, we should support the recommendations of the 250 scientists and medical doctors who signed the 5G Appeal that calls for an immediate moratorium on the deployment of 5G and demand that our government fund the research needed to adopt biologically based exposure limits that protect our health and safety.”

How Safe Is Online Banking on a Mobile Phone?

So, how safe is mobile banking? It all depends on how cautious and well-informed you are.

Hackers exploit weak passwords and vulnerabilities of public Wi-Fi to infect devices with malware. However, most mobile banking attacks happen through social engineering – when users are manipulated to give up their usernames and passwords to hackers, scammers and other cybercriminals.

Social engineering techniques range from phone calls, malware links, phishing websites to more advanced (and less frequent) attacks like phony banking apps. It’s much easier to fall for a scam than you think, and the best defense against them is knowledge. Here are some tips for safe mobile banking:

1. Don’t lose your phone

The biggest security threat of your mobile phone is also its greatest asset – its size. Phones are small, handy, beautiful, and easy to lose.

Losing a phone is as heartbreaking as losing a part of yourself, but it gets even worse. If someone who found or stole your phone uses it to access your bank account, you could lose much more.

A strong password (made of a random string of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols, at least six characters long) is the most secure way to lock your phone.

If you are afraid to forget the password, use a PIN key (something more difficult and unique than 1111) or a pattern lock with biometric identification, which can be:

• Facial recognition – convenient but not secure, since it can sometimes be bypassed with a photograph.
• Iris scanning – the pattern of your iris is unique and can’t be replicated with a simple photo.
• Fingerprints – low false-acceptance rates, perfect if you don’t often wear gloves.

Iris scanning or fingerprint identification with a strong PIN will grant you easy and secure access to your phone.

Never leave your phone unattended. Install an anti-theft and recovery app that can locate your phone, lock it remotely, or even wipe your data if it gets stolen.

As a final layer of security, always log out from your banking app after you finish your operations.

2. Use the official banking app, not the browser

The second biggest security threat concerns the banking app. If you aren’t careful, you could download a fake banking app created by scammers to break into your account.

Make sure your bank created or approves of the app you are downloading. Get it from their website. Moreover, do not use mobile browsers to log in to your bank account – they are less secure than bank-sanctioned apps.

Finaly, before downloading any app to your phone, you should research the developer, read the reviews, check the app rating on Google Play or App Store. Poorly designed or malicious third-party apps could use your username and password to access your bank account and empty or monitor it.

3. Don’t just follow any link you see

You pick up your phone, open up the email app, and notice that your bank sent you an announcement about a new service. The letter ends, “You can save up to a thousand dollars per year! For more details, follow this link.” You click it, go to the landing page, log in, but some error occurs, and you are disconnected from the website.

You just gave your username and password to a scammer.

The email you got was not from your bank, but from scammers pretending to be your bank. You would have noticed it had you checked the sender details more carefully. The landing page was actually a clone made to look like your bank’s website. When you entered your password, you handed your data straight to cybercriminals.

Always check the URL and domain of any link you are about to click on, especially if it claims to be from your bank. If it looks suspicious – avoid it. The same applies to SMS messages or messages and links on social media.

Never send your username or password via email, social media or text message. If you did – change the password immediately.

4. Don’t use mobile banking on public Wi-Fi

Anyone on a public Wi-Fi network is in danger of a security breach. Most of these networks lack basic security measures and have poor router configurations and weak passwords. Mobile banking or any other activity that exposes your sensitive data should never be done on public Wi-Fi.

If a hacker is monitoring the public Wi-Fi or hotspot you are using, they could intercept the data being transferred to and from your phone and use it to access your banking account.

If you are scrolling in a library or a coffee shop and you need to access your bank account, use your cellular network instead. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than public Wi-Fi. Better yet, turn on a VPN and use public Wi-Fi without the risk of compromising your personal data. A VPN encrypts your web traffic, making it extraordinarily difficult to intercept and decipher.

Is Mobile Banking Safe on Android?

Since the Android platform allows its users more flexibility, it also leaves more security holes than iOS systems. Minimize your risks by downloading apps only from Google Play and update them in a timely manner.

Go to your Android settings and make sure that you have turned on Google Play Protect, which scans your apps for suspicious behavior. You can also use the Find My Device setting, which lets you find, ring, lock, or even wipe your device from afar.

Go through the apps you’ve downloaded and installed on your phone and delete the ones you do not need or use – each represents an unnecessary potential vulnerability. Old apps may also be poorly supported or have security holes or malware. A clean and tidy Android system is likely to be a secure one.

Is Mobile Banking Safe on iPhone?

Banking apps on iOS tend to be secure thanks to the rigorous standards of the App Store. The most vulnerable iOS systems are those that have been jailbroken.

Jailbreaking means cracking the standard settings of an iOS system so that you can modify your phone in ways that Apple does not allow. With a jailbroken phone, you can install apps not authorized by Apple, and you can also remove the security protocols that Apple has built into the device. Jailbreaking also voids the warranty, so you won’t get support from Apple when you might need it most.

If you are just a regular iOS user, you should never jailbreak your iPhone. Only use apps from the App Store, which are usually safe. Malware may bypass Apple’s defenses once in a while so you should always be careful, but they certainly catch many potential threats.

Final Thoughts

Is it safe to use mobile banking apps? Yes. Download the official banking app, update it constantly, use a VPN with a public Wi-Fi, and keep your phone close by!

However, that doesn’t make you completely safe from scams, malware attacks, and hacking. Your common sense is the last line of defense. A victim of mobile banking breaches will usually be someone who does not take their security seriously.

Can WiFi cause cancer?

WiFi operates in the 2 to 5 GHz range - part of the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This is in the same part of the spectrum where cell phones operate so I may refer to WiFi or cellphone electromagnetic radiation interchangeably. These are radio waves - no different than those used to broadcast television programs - except that they are higher in frequency. They aren't nearly as high a frequency as visible light - and no one worries about getting cancer from visible light (ultraviolet light, on the other hand, causes skin cancer - but this is the minimum energy necessary to cause ionizations that can cause breaks in strands of DNA - which is the mechanism by which cancer cells can be created). There is no credible evidence that non-ionizing radiation has any adverse health effects at all. There is no radiobiologic mechanism that could explain such an association - and absolutely no scientifically valid evidence that this has ever happened.

Dr Garry Larson MD, Medical Director- Procure Proton Therapy Center OKC states that he has treated patients with cancer for over thirty years as a board certified radiation oncologist and he is familiar with every carcinogenic agent known to man - He is with absolute certainty that radio waves cannot harm you (unless perhaps you were in the path of a multi-megawatt microwave beam in which case they might cook you - but as far as he knows, there is no likelihood that this danger even exists).

There has never been (and will never be) a randomised trial assessing the cause and effect relationship between radio frequency emissions and neoplastic disease. In order to have a randomised study, half of the randomly selected subjects would need to avoid cellphone use and that's not going to happen.

Humans have been exposed to man-made radio frequency radiation for over 100 years and we have always been exposed to microwave radiation from the Cosmos.

For example, the latency period for radiation induced malignancies is, on the average say 20 years, but epidemiologic studies of large groups of people (that only require a few thousand patients to reach stastistical significance) exposed to ionizing radiation start showing an increase above baseline by seven years. So conservatively, there should be at least a few excess cases of glioma, caused by cellular (or WiFi) electromagnetic radiation by now.

See this reference which looks at all the reported cases of gliomas caused by ionizing radiation (where we have a plausible explanation for cause and effect). Millions of people have received brain irradiation and only 73 cases of radiation induced gliomas have been reported.

A Report on Radiation-Induced Gliomas

We do have evidence that cellphones (or WiFi) do NOT cause an increase in brain tumors. Look at the time period over which cellphone use became common - say over the last twenty years. During that time, the incidence of brain tumours has remained absolutely flat. With over four billion people using cellphones (or WiFi) today, if there was any influence on the development of brain tumors, we would be seeing that by now.

The data from the National Cancer Institute below shows no increase in the incidence of primary brain tumours over the period of time that cell phones have been in use.

Say someone found a potential association between carrying coins in your pocket and the risk of a particular type of tumour. It would set off a frenzy of activity among a group of people who were convinced that this association was real. They would lobby for a law requiring that warning signs be placed on change machines. The effect would snowball until some people would demand that the government stop minting coins.

So lets review

There is no biologic mechanism to explain why non ionizing radiation (like the cellphone's emission of radio waves) could induce any type of tumour
We do have a mechanism to explain the association between ionizing radiation and tumour induction, but out of millions of people who have received radiation therapy to their brain, only 73 radiation induced gliomas have been reported in the world's literature.
For radiation induced neoplasms in general, epidemiologic studies can show an increase in the likelihood of tumours with only a few thousand people over a time period less than ten years

At least something on the order of millions (if not billions) of people have used cell phones for over two decades now and there is no evidence that the incidence of brain tumors has increased over that time period
Now lets get down to why this sort of irrational belief takes hold and, among other things, prompts five questions on this subject (at least that I have seen) in the time that I have been reading Quora (less than two months).

We have essentially no control over whether we live or die - except that we should avoid dangerous behaviours like smoking, becoming obese, not wearing seat belts, texting while driving, etc. Otherwise, over a trillion cells carry on countless biochemical processes that we have no control over. One out of four people will get cancer - beyond avoiding foolish behaviour, we can't influence that risk.

Since we have this subconscious, ever present fear of death (see below*), we employ magical thinking to give us a false sense of power over it. When we create artificial threats to our survival in our imagination - and then avoid practicing behaviours that make us vulnerable to those threats - we feel we have some power over whether we live or die. These are also know as superstitions.

Primitive cultures made sacrifices to imaginary gods so they wouldn't destroy their village - Children learn to avoid stepping on cracks - The germaphobe may engage in compulsive hand washing - and some people avoid putting their cellphone right next to their skin.