The resignation of ACC chief
executive Ralph Stewart highlights
another, more disturbing issue slowly creeping through society; the erosion of
personal privacy.
The ACC
caused uproar when it sent the personal details of thousands of claimants to
other clients in its database. Even in our advanced technological age, human
error is evidently still a factor in many breaches of privacy.
But when
we willingly hand over all our personal details it is inevitable that they will
eventually be leaked or fall into the wrong hands.
According
to Hackers Anonymous, there is not a computer system in the world that cannot
be hacked.
No matter
how tight our security measures, there will always be someone who can break
them. This has led to the rise of the criminal hacker as paper money declines
and spending is increasingly virtual, meaning the geeks really will inherit the
earth.
The British government is proposing a new legislation which will
allow it to capture and record all citizen’s personal phone calls, email
destinations and website searches. While the outcry from human rights
campaigners is understandable, it is perhaps the greater risk of leaks which is
more concerning from a practical point of view.
Putting aside the issue of who has the right to hold so much
information about a free people, aren’t we asking for trouble when we can’t
even keep bank details out of the hands of hackers?
One in five New Zealanders sees no problem accessing
social networking websites for personal use at work, according to a survey.
This means that theoretically one in five New
Zealanders would be comfortable with their employers knowing what sites they
access during work.
Considering this as a small scale experiment of the larger
(and potentially global, because let’s face it, which government would not want
the power to track its citizens’ every move) decision to track society’s
technological footprint, how long would it be until someone leaked this list of
websites to an external source?
The argument that innocent people need not fear their
footprint being circulated is again, beside the point in this instance.
The issue here is how safe a Pandora’s box of information
can possibly be when it is so valuable to hackers and people of a decidedly
more criminal nature.