We’ve recently been inundated with reports of data breaches, and the latest is a doozy: More than 4 million present and former federal employees had their personal information stolen by anonymous hackers possibly working for China’s military. As a CNN guest columnist puts it, not exactly America’s nuclear codes, but nevertheless unsettling for the victims. This affects all of us, because even if you’re not a federal worker, or a Target shopper, or whatever, you could just as readily become a victim of the next cyberattack. You might want to read things like this private internet access vpn review to see if it is a service that can help encrypt and protect your access to the internet.
The guest columnist, Douglas Rushkoff, who in his day job is a professor of media studies, invites us to use this “opportunity to reconsider our relationship to data, to secrecy, and to the Internet itself.” While many people will react by saying, “We need to increase internet security,” Rushkoff takes a different tack. He writes, “Instead of changing the Internet to better secure sensitive data, we should get sensitive data off the people’s network.”
The problem is, “The internet was not designed for this,” he says. Its beginnings trace back to peer sharing of information, premised on mutual trust. It was meant to be open and accessible. It wasn’t envisioned as a conduit for sensitive information that people wish (and need) to keep secret. Data encryption, firewalls, and other security measures were tacked on later, and while these can work for casual browsers of the internet obviously aren’t working as well as they need to when it comes to more serious ventures like governmental and financial services.
The solution, Rushkoff argues, is a parallel network: “The government, along with business, banking, and everything else that depends on security should simply get off the Internet and build another one.” But that would cost a lot of money, so don’t expect it to happen. Instead, businesses will try to figure out ways to charge for access, government will try to figure out ways to close off access, and we helpless individuals will continue to be victimized by security threats and data breaches. In short, expect it to be business as usual.
(Read Rushkoff’s column here.)