BUS1BIB Big Ideas In Business

Question:

“When it comes to privacy and security, I’m reminded of folks who drive to the airport without their seat belt on and then worry about the plane crashing.

Planes do crash on very rare occasions but not nearly as often as cars. And when driving, there are things you can do to increase your safety, whereas when flying, there’s not much you can do to protect yourself but we do rely on the airline industry and government regulators to do all they can to protect us.

Likewise, when we’re online, there are things we can control and things we can’t. For example, we can control the passwords we use and what we say in social media. But sometimes we’re victims of other people’s carelessness or malice, such as when a service or a retailer gets hacked or a government employee loses a briefcase containing a laptop with people’s unencrypted personal information.

And then there are those other privacy breaches that result from deliberate policies of service providers and advertising networks to harvest user information for a variety of purposes, ranging from targeting advertising to conducting market research.”