A life in the merde

Privacy, what privacy?

February 20th, 2006

Some things never seems to stop amazing me. One of these things are the constant denial of computer security threats. Working as a consultant in computer security I am of course a little biased, but still the public ignorance amazes me.

One things is the common idea that no one will ever attack me, my private life is not at all interesting and therefore I should not use any protection. I lived by this untill a friend of mine had his msn bugged by a rather bizarre coworker. After that I turned on encryption on my msn…

Sick coworkers are one thing, but commercial actors another. Knowing how good airlines are at selling tickets to each and every passenger at different prices (strangely coinciding with the highest price they are willing to pay) I doubt that others wouldn’t do the same. They only lack two factors, information about the customers and the ability to differnciate among them. Information is obvious that we give away easily, in a recent experiment most employees gave away their password for a chocolate bar. Then they just need to be able to differenciate, and I doubt that it is going to stop the.

But still, we generally don’t care at all. Even knowing how much information people can find about me out there and even though I know how many traces I leave every day I simply don’t care. And I am supposed to be the paranoid one…

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