The weeks roll by and those of us in the UK are slowly but inevitably discovering that everybody in the country is actually in possession of everybody else’s confidential information; all of which was accidentally printed onto the inside of seventy-five million packets of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. I’m more aware than ever of the technological generation gap. It’s growing rapidly and the haves and have-nots in technical competence are heading for a clash.
It’s not just the fact that information isn’t really as secure or competently handled as we pretend it is. Social networking is encouraging people to share vast quantities of information about themselves that no-one would ever have had access too before. Facebook especially has successfully given people a sense of security through granularity in the amount of information they share with their different networks of friends.
The problem is the reaction of the establishment to this casual whoring of personal details. Insurance companies, banks and Credit Card issuers are stepping out to tell us that we’re doing it wrong. Prematurely middle-aged men sternly tell us that sharing so much information on the internets leaves us vulnerable to so called ‘identity theft’. Identity theft is obviously awful; especially at Christmas time. No-one realises the horrible reality until they wake up in the body of their next door neighbour’s cat, paralysed by shock, fear and a severe flea infestation. Meanwhile the real Puss has collapsed against a back alley wall of Pets At Home, wasted on a binge cocktail of Whiskers, Felix, Pro Plus and your soul itself. All paid for in your name.
But such short-sighted advice is not going to get us anywhere. The horse has bolted and modern culture is already open. As it spreads through the technophile community, it will become normal. Like everything else published on the internet, telling people not to do something after the fact is ineffective. It didn’t work for the music industry and I can’t see it working for anything else.
Services — banks, governments and so forth — are supposed to fit the people who make up the society in which they operate. When society goes through a change in attitudes, those services should adapt to reflect the people that they exist for.
It’s that which makes this situation backward. The servant is telling us off, trying to scare us into compliance with RSPCA enraging horror stories of feline identity splicing. Nation-wide poster campaigns of bunnies with shotguns and Daily Mail leaders of guinea pigs funding international terrorism (and stealing the jobs of hard-working, white, British terrorist backers) cannot be far behind.
But that message is wrong and should be resisted. If my identity is impersonated because someone pieces together a profile of me from information on the internet, then the safeguards of the organisations who validate my identity are broken. If it is the case that society has decided to share their keys, then it is up to the banks, governments and insurance companies to change their locks. It is for them to fix their broken models, not for us to hold back or regress an evolving society to accommodate bad servants.
If that means logging into an online banking service takes a little longer, then so be it. The inconvenience of additional validation to protect identity is moot when compared to the detriment of preventing an entire generation of people from interacting with each other as freely as they wish.
Ben is a 24 year old Web Developer from Cambridge and is a computing graduate of the University of Manchester.