Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Death of Privacy

I'm posting this just to throw some thoughts up for latter development. But I see now that everything is connected. Meaning that all issues that revolve around any piece of information are linked and thus by touching on one piont in the web you affect the entire system like a ripple effect.

Privacy and the emergence of you as a digitally profiled identity are hot debated issues. Key questions:

1) How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice in order to gain greater convenience?

2) How much control over your privacy should you have or be a given?

3) Should choice be an option? (Case in point where children are tagged with GPS for recovery purposes. Does the child get to choose?)

4) Should you as an individual be made aware of the risks associated with buying a device and the impact on your privacy? (Ex: Cell phone hacking where the attacker turns on the camera or listens to your conversations to launch Spear Phishing attack at a latter time.)

The fact of life today is that if targeted by a criminal intent on compromising your identity, that the probability is high that you will suffer damages. The damages can range from the inconvenience of having to work with you bank, and other financial institutions, to being falsely imprisoned. I have been accused of being too paranoid, but would argue that we stand past the threshold of the point in time where being to paranoid is excessive, and are in the place where we can’t be paranoid enough. As an information security practice we are the first and last line of defense in a war that we can not loose. The stakes have never been higher and will continue to expand as systems that once were independent of one another become more and more integrated.

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