Digital disaster?

As a collector of secondhand books, the benefits of being able to search individual book websites and use the two or three secondhand book web portals that have obtained dominance, is little short of revolutionary. Where once I’d have had to rely on pot luck when visiting physical secondhand bookshops, or the occasional bookfair, I can now search for the specific edition of the specific book I want, and be connected with sellers all over the world. Brilliant! And there are plenty of examples where IT has revolutionised, for the better, hobbies, work practices and people’s leisure time in general.

 

However, as with all inventions, with the good comes the bad. In the UK at least, our town and village shops are being decimated by the online retailers, with the long term consequences of who knows what social problems…ok, so that’s just market forces. Centuries ago, the manual labourers in the fields were gradually replaced by machines, and in factories the folks that operated the machines have gradually been replaced by automation. And the digital economy is creating new business opportunities, so not everyone will be losing their jobs just yet.

 

So, what’s not to like about digital life? In one word – security. Now, the recent leaking of the high and mighties legitimate and not so legitimate attempts to avoid paying tax and/or to accumulate large amounts of wealth in secret locations might appear to be a reason to celebrate. However, it’s just the latest in an increasingly long line of data leaks, where many people’s supposedly private information has been made rather too public. And, no matter what anyone tells you, there is no such thing as total security. Yes, there’s plenty of things that can be done to make the cyber criminals job extremely difficult, but, by and large, the more difficult it is for the criminal, the more complicated is the security protocol for us all. I’m sure I’m not the only one who tries to remember multiple passwords for various applications – after all, writing them down defeats the whole object. But, being human, and not a computer, I only have so much memory space, and there are plenty of occasions when I can’t remember the right user name/password combination. Of course, I can email for a helpful hint, but that’s not terribly secure, is it?!

 

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the rush to the Digital Age is that, sooner or later, we won’t be given any choice as to whether or not we want to do things digitally – whether it be banking, shopping, or most other activities. All businesses have worked out that if they can actually get us, the customer, to do all their hard work for them, then they can sack a load of staff and save a huge amount of money. Why pay someone to sit behind a window at the bank to help customers, when customers can go online and help themselves – even if not entirely securely? After all, if anything goes wrong, the bank will make good the losses.

 

And here’s the rub, while victims of cyber crime are generally compensated by the organisation with which they were dealing at the time of the crime, there’s growing evidence that the burden of proof is beginning to pass from business to the consumer.  No longer is it good enough for the customer to say he’s been defrauded during a transaction with an online retailer. The retailer is beginning to demand evidence that the customer took all the right precautions before, during and after the transaction. And, of course, it’s much easier for cyber criminals to steal information and money from people in cyber space than it ever was in the physical world. The number of cyber crime cases seems to be infinitely more than the bank robberies and fraud cases reported pre-digital.

 

Clearly, there’s no winding the clock back, but it is to be hoped that both consumers and governments understand the potentially disastrous consequences of unchecked digital progress, and, just maybe, start to understand what is best done physically and what’s best done digitally. Unintended, harmful consequences of progress are not a reason to become heavy-handed with regulation, but there’s definitely a case to be made for a better understanding of just what are the dangers of embracing digital technology without some kind of scepticism.

 

For example, folks who announce on Facebook that they are on holiday, and return to find that they’ve been burgled, might be described as ‘careless’, but here’s a classic case of the digital dilemma. Facebook has been set up as an online social interaction site, where folks are encouraged to share their thoughts and events in their lives – and there’s no obvious warning on the site that there could be a danger in being too open. Now, the robbed couple would have a job to claim compensation from Facebook, but, for the site is to work properly, users should be able to use it ‘without thinking’. A sanitised Facebook, without opinion, holiday snaps and the like, would be a boring place, but it would be safe!

 

There are no easy answers to the issues surrounding security but, as the Digital Age develops, the job of the risk assessors – and that’s all of us from the government right down to individual citizens – is going to become increasingly complicated and important.