Media pieces are fostering unnecessary fear in people who are just trying to find out a little about computers before buying. Scare tactics on computer security issues go entirely against the grain of what defines Internet culture - the free exchange of information and the sharing of technology. If people are made afraid of using the Internet, sending emails or even having a standalone computer outside of a steel-reinforced concrete bunker, there will be no exchange of information or technology.
Surely I'm not the only person in the world who has absolutely no problem with email tapping the purpose of which is to intercept criminal activity, not to see if I'm forwarding some terrible joke on company time.
You might say this is an extreme example, but it is not. The technology that allows the interception of e-mails was created for exactly these reasons, and not, as conspiracy theorists would have you believe, to destroy your hard drive in order to see how many politically incorrect e-mails you've sent. If checking someone's e-mail history could help jail criminals, isn't the use of this power justified?
It's not just the danger to the ordinary individual computer user that is grossly and constantly exaggerated. Even huge organisations are far more likely to be hacked by social misfits with far too much time on their hands, than to have havoc wreaked on their network by some highly organised shadowy source. As John Naughton of the Observer wrote: "There will always be 16-year-old hackers . . . Short of banning the use of computers, shutting down the global telephone network and shooting all 16year-olds on sight, there is little any authority structure can do about it." In other words, hacking exists and always will do, but to worry everyone about it helps no one.
Though I may know a bit more about computers and the Internet than most users, I don't have a clue how to hack a computer. Nor do I have any desire to ever know how to do so, and I don't know of any reason why anyone would be interested in hacking into my computer.
Scaring people into wondering if using a computer is a safe activity serves no one. Individuals could, ultimately, lose out on using the most liberating technology yet invented, while commerce suffers if people are unwilling to transact business online. The instances of people's credit-card numbers, for instance, being stolen as a result of purchasing over the Internet are minute in comparison to the number of transactions that take place. Yet fear of this information being stolen is always cited as the main reason for reluctance to shop online. Never mind the fact that you are more likely to have your handbag or wallet robbed that to have your creditcard details stolen over the Internet.
To counter this, some banks have introduced a new service which allows customers to shop on the Internet using a simulated, rather than actual, credit-card number. The simulated number is used for only one purchase and so is useless to anyone else even if it is obtained by a hacker. While this will undoubtedly make it easier for some people to use commercial Internet services, one cannot help but feel that it perpetuates the myth that buying online is a highly dangerous thing to do.
What all of these myths about security boil down to is that a state of fear is being bred and used to justify acres of print. This is not to say that there aren't inherent dangers and situations that the world needs to know about. It's just that we need to keep things in perspective.
People's willingness and ability to use the Internet for educational purposes can only be hindered by the scare tactics employed in many articles written about the web and computer use. It might be a shock to the authors of these screeds but, really, Big Brother isn't watching.
