Pssst... hey buddy, wanna buy a password?
We live in a digital age. Everything is online and accessible with a few keystrokes or the right program. This is the nature of digital information.
All of our data is stored on hard drives somewhere. It could be the machine in your house if you are disconnected from the web but far more likely your information is stored on a data farm. Rows and rows of servers keeping track of the world's collective output at any given moment.
Stealing digital information is really hard to stop and hard to detect. It is hard to stop because it depends on the person programming the security protocol to be smarter than the thousands of programmers trying to crack it. It is bit like a hockey goalie. Even the best goalie, peppered with enough shots, is going to let one in.
In the case of digital security, all it takes is one person to breakthrough and the information quickly spreads to everyone else.
There is little hope of keeping anything digital secure in perpetuity. The only real way is to air gap it. Have a system which has no external connections and sufficiently isolated so no one can physically access it.
Of course, what is the point of such a system? After all, digital information no one can access is not really worth the trouble.
As to the hard to detect, stealing digital information is a matter of downloading a copy of the bits in memory. Electrical signals indicating ones and zeros. But the information is still in the original machine. Nothing is taken but a copy. How can programmers even know their data has been scanned?
Of course, programmers interested in computer security have come up with methods for detecting unauthorized access, but there are thousands of programmers busy trying to find ways around these programs. It is the goalie scenario again - enough attempts and someone is going to get through. This is the price of living in a digital age.
Complex security software to protect our information and complex anti-security software trying to access it. And all of this is before artificial intelligence gets involved. We might need to go back to hiding our money in our mattresses and keeping paper copies of our documents at home. It is the only way our personal data will ultimately be secure.
That said, the recent scoop of personal data from Facebook was a very different scenario. Judging by Facebook's television commercial admitting what they did was wrong and promising they will do better, even the executives at Facebook realize the data breach has resulted in a serious erosion of public trust.
In this case, people willingly provided Facebook with all sorts of information about their lives.
Who their friends are, where they like to eat, what fashion they find interesting, whether or not they are in a relationship, pictures of their children/friends/parents/siblings/pets and many other details about their lives.
Facebook users handed this information to the corporation with little understanding of what it would be used for or how it might be disseminated. And Facebook did exactly what it was built to do. It mined the information for connections. It assessed what advertisements are most likely to elicit a response. It built a profile of each user.
It really shouldn't have come as a shock to anyone when it was revealed this information had been used to assess voting patterns. Nor should it come as a surprise that agencies used the information to target individuals with appropriate advertising. Or even misinformation about one or the other candidate.
This sort of data mining has been going on for as long as there have been elections. Locally, some of the polls in town are known to favour one or the other of the major political parties. The parties use this information when going house to house or engaging in phone campaigns.
The computer version of this data mining is not different in kind. It is just more sophisticated and more extensive but it is essentially the same process political parties and people have been using for years.
But it isn't just elections. Reward or shopper loyalty cards are not really about giving you rewards. Rather, they are about developing a database on your shopping habits. This is why they ask for demographic information such as birthdate when you sign up. They use your info to target you.
There are too many customers for a grocery store to know everyone personally. We no longer have the one-to-one relationship with the butcher or tailor or candlestick maker. Instead, they rely on big data to tell them how to best serve their customers.
All of this comes at a cost.
We no longer have privacy in the digital age. Not even if we have a password.
