Ever wondered what happens to our data once we put in in the open world of social media, the cloud and all places? While we may not give it much of a thought, but with every bit of information posted online, we are leaving breadcrumbs for digital systems to track us, track who we are, where we live, what we do, what we like and dislike and much more. Today, it is just being used to advertise to us, but what if the same information is used to attack our personal liberties some day? So how vulnerable are we in the digital world?
Our lives are not private anymore and majority of the times it is us who has chosen to make our lives public. We take photos and post them on Instagram , we eat anywhere and post it on Facebook, heck we feel anything, we post it on twitter. As a result of this a huge portion of our lives is not hidden from the world.
In the world of digital security there is a very important term called vulnerability assessment. What that means is to determine how vulnerable our data or servers are to attacks. How much of exposure does the system have towards any potential attack. Companies keep innovating to ensure that the vulnerabilities are kept at a minimum. As ‘risk’ is a combination of vulnerability and threat. Therefore, the higher the threat, the lower has to be the vulnerability to keep the overall risk low.
In order to understand, this ‘risk’. Let us take examples of two businesses. The first one is a local 7-11 store which keeps ledgers of accounts, the cash that they generate each day. All this is kept in a simple store, it does not have a security guard most of the times, may be a couple of CCTV cameras are there. The reason why they do not need to invest a lot on security and safety is because the ‘threat’ is low. The number of people who may want to mug and take the risk of being caught is low as the valuables inside the store are low key. Therefore, when asked the question, how vulnerable are we? Our answer would be, very little.
Now let us compare the same example to a bank, the amount of security that they have. There are multiple armed guards, each corner of the bank has cameras, there are panic buttons and the cash is kept inside vaults. The reason is that a bank has a very high level of ‘threat’ due to the vast amount of money being managed.
Let us now focus on the digital world where ‘our data’ is the value that we have. Our privacy is one of the key things that we cherish. While the threat of someone trying to steal, manipulate of exploit our data is pretty low; which mean ‘threat’ is quite low. However, let us look at our vulnerability. Our data is out in the public, everyone can see it. Hence, our vulnerability is at a very high level.
How vulnerable are we? A lot!
Earlier, there were very few tools that could help attackers utilise this public information and exploit it. However, with the advent of AI and sophisticated engines, now it is becoming easier day by day. Hence our risk is increasing day by day. Does it mean that we not need to look at our ‘vulnerability’ in the digital world. According to us, it is high time that we become aware of what we are exposing to the whole world. It is time to take our digital safety, privacy more seriously.
Using the above information, write an article in around 1200 words which tells the need to make sure that we are more careful while we post stuff on social media. AI is a threat to privacy and bring that out as well in the article. Keep the article in a language that is light hearted. Use short sentences and words that can be understand by an average American, may be use a colloquial language spoken generally in California.
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