There seems to be a new cyber security scandal breaking every week. Either someone hacks a major store’s customer database or someone is hacking poorly secured servers that contain sensitive information.
The sheer regularity of these invasions of privacy makes them at once a constant, annoying drip in our consciousness and a source of existential threat.
And given the fact that we live in the Digital Age, it’s a difficult feat to use both the amazing technology and at the same time protect ourselves from its all-too-obvious risks to our privacy.
Younger generations are already happy to give up their privacy to play a new game, use a new app or open a social media page. And the authors of articles on tech websites consider anyone who doesn’t want to use “fintech,” for example, or enable the location services on their mobile apps to be an old fuddy duddy, instead of someone who is intensely privacy conscious.
This disconnect between the older generation and the younger generation is exactly that. And as the younger people start to integrate more into society and get jobs and raise families, they realize that their financial information, their spending habits and their mobility can all be tracked — as well as bought and sold — and there’s nothing they can do about it.
It used to be just a “conspiracy theory” that the government has access to all our records, phone calls, emails, etc. Well, we know that to be a fact now. So the government is spying on us. I’m not happy about it, but I would rather know.
The problem comes when private companies start getting in the same game. Now big retail stores, just for example, can use Big Data to crunch the massive amount of information they have gathered on customers and use it to predict what you will buy and when. The problem is, while they have spent a ton on market research technology, they haven’t spent a similar amount on cyber security for that information — your information. That means hackers can come in and steal millions of names and the details that go along with it.
Then, they can take those names and rent or sell them on the Dark Web (the other side of the internet where shady characters hang out). These people get your name and begin their own nefarious efforts to find out what they can get out of these names and data.
But companies don’t really care when they’re hacked; it’s a cost of doing business. As long as the money they already made from you is safe, they are not concerned that your data has been stolen. And that is where the problem lies.
That means we are the only motivated protectors of our online security.
Recently a story that reinforces this fact hit the papers. It wasn’t a front page story; it was on A12 in The Washington Post and showed how low on the list of priorities individual privacy is to the government.
The Federal Communications Commission was looking for a company to run a highly sensitive national database that routes virtually all the phone calls in the country. The contract was won by Telcordia, a company owned by Sweden-based Ericcson.
And this was done with FBI approval.
According to The Post, the database routes the calls and texts of 650 million accounts of Americans and Canadians for more than 2,000 carriers.
That means a foreign company is in control of all this information. It means that the FCC has built a honey pot for hackers.
And now we wait for the other shoe to drop — a hack at Telcordia.
There are two things we can do while we wait.
First, we can protect ourselves as much as we can from outside threats. Onion routers are highly secure and very tough to hack. Find out more at torproject.org. You can buy onion routers at Best Buy or through Amazon.
Second, we can invest in cyber-security stocks. This digital world is not getting any safer, so there will be more and more investment in security. Remember, no one has won — or even prosecuted — a case against the stores for their exposure of their customers’ names. There have been lawsuits that have been settled, but sooner or later a smart attorney will make bad cyber security as negligent as the tobacco companies in the ’80s and ’90s.
— GS Early
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