Information Security and Human Dependence on Computers

How dependent are you upon information and communication technologies? If you’re like most people in the developed world, your day-to-day activities are increasingly characterized by interactions with technology. Computational capabilities are being embedded in a rapidly increasing number and variety of products ranging from athletic shoes to kitchen appliances to implantable medical devices, and with every passing day, computers are hence controlling, administering, and making decisions about more and more aspects of our daily lives.

What we can conclude from this is that we are becoming more and more dependent on these information and communication technologies every single day, and this situation has very important implications with respect to our privacy and security. To better understand why, consider the relationship between our dependence on technology and risk: Because we live in a world where we are increasingly entrusting our lives and our livelihoods to computer technologies, and because those technologies are not entirely dependable, safe, or secure, our increasing reliance upon information and communication technologies carries with it many new risks that were not present prior to the rise of the Information Age. As a discipline and as a profession, then, one of the major goals of information security is to find ways of mitigating these risks -- that is, to allow us to have our information technology cake and eat it too.