Friday, June 15, 2012

Internet privacy - are we building our own Pandora’s Box?


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.