We will never be hacked or reveal your name Charles Knight
I would really appreciate some comments on this:
Would I give out my credit card information over the Internet? Sure, I do all the time.
Would I sign up for on-line banking and register all of my accounts? If I had time, yes.
Would I write reviews, in my name, about a restaurant, hotel, book or movie? Why not.
Would I disclose my email address and my salary if I never got found out? Would you?
Would I upload all my personal health information to a really secure web site? Hell no!
No ifs, ands, or buts, what type of information have you ever entrusted to a secure site?
June 12th, 2008 at 10:55 am
A lot of those don’t have the same downside that public disclosure about your health would. If your credit card number gets stolen, your credit card company cancels it and issues you a new one (you’re not liable for purchases made with a stolen card). Online banking is a little more iffy but I’d think your bank would take some fault if your account got hacked. With your health information, there’s no remedy. No one’s issuing you new health information, compensating you, etc. Your health information would just be out there and insurance companies, employers, etc. could use that information to deny you insurance, not hire you, etc. There’s no such downside with credit cards or banking info.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Exactly!
June 12th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Very interesting article. We are about to launch a B2B vendor search and recommendation site (www.VendorCity.com) and have decided that, unless you know the person giving the recommendation and that they are okay sharing their contact info, the actual recommender info will only be demographical and not directly connected to the person.
To answer your specific questions:
Credit card info: yep
Banking: yep
Reviews and recommendations: yep
Salary: probably if there was value in it for me
Personal health: probably not (for reasons mentioned by Jon) but in the long term, I am guessing that this will happen. It just needs to be done well.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Whatever you do online will be searchable one day.
There are no secure servers/websites on the web. Ok, most servers are now equipped with a firewall, but that does not protect a webserver from other attacks. Hacking firewalls is out, the new ways of hacking are easy: your little sister can do it (for example read something about SQL injection). The firewall does not protect from these attacks. It is scary to see that even government sites have vulnerabilities that allow some attacker to manipulate its data base.
Important, private information should never be stored online. Health records is one these informations, it simply does not belong on the web. I can image that many companies, institutions, governments etc. want to share their data bases via the internet, because: it’s the future, you know, and soo practical. But it’s not safe - and never will be. It’s rubbish.