And wherever one looks, there is another (or a continuing) problem:
- Do you own stock? You might be horrified to know that "Hackers Gained Access to Nasdaq Systems ..." but not (yet) the trading systems.
- If you do own stock, I hope it's not shares of Sony. Sony now admits to losing personal data in the hack of its Playstation Network and has been sued. Estimates for the impact of the PSN outage on Sony run into the billions.
- Like your shiny new 4G cell phone? Verizon's 4G wireless network recently had a national outage.
- Apple's undeclared data gathering from iPhones is more egregious than first reported. It turns out that even if you disable location services, your iPhone still gathers location data on you.
How far-fetched is it that the Bad Guys will soon try to spy on us through locomoting networked platforms in our own homes? Be very careful what apps you install in your little automated helper.
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2 comments:
I try to think about privacy in terms of real risk. If someone has my personal info, I see them as being much more likely to use it to target ads at me than to kill me.
I've always hated the novel 1984 because
1: it takes all the creativity out of philosophical arguments of privacy vs security.
2: They heavily play down the human resource requirements of monitoring a large population.
So I hope that my personal details are too boring for anyone to want to steal them for purposes other than advertising or credit card fraud.
Hi Erik,
Identity theft (of which credit-card theft is only one aspect) is impersonal to the %^&$#!! who does it -- and very personal to the victim. I know people to whom it's happened, and cleaning up the mess takes months.
- Ed
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