Trust: Ill-Advised in a Digital Age By SOMINI SENGUPTA August 11, 2012
Las Vegas BRUCE SCHNEIER ordered a Coke, no ice, at the Rio casino on a Saturday afternoon. I ordered Diet Coke, also no ice, and handed the bartender an American Express card. He said he needed to see proof of identity. Credit cards are often stolen around here, and eight casino workers had recently been fired for not demanding ID, he quietly explained. The bartender wanted to keep his job. Mr. Schneier, 49, is a student of interactions like this, offline and on. He is a cryptographer, blogger and iconoclast in the world of computer security, and his latest subject of inquiry is trust: how it is cultivated, destroyed and tweaked in the digital age. Offline, he likes to point out, we have ways to establish trust, as in this casino, where we expect the bartender to serve us a soda, not a poisoned chalice. We establish trust based on how we speak, whether we appear drunk or deranged, whether we meet at a casino or a toy store - and also, irrationally, on attributes like race and age. Online, this becomes even more complicated, Mr. Schneier argues. We no longer think twice about letting our friends see our vacation pictures on Flickr, now owned by Yahoo. So habituated have we become to revealing intimate details, Mr. Schneier writes, that we forget that Facebook, the company, can read our missives at any time, potentially forever. Mr. Schneier is in charge of technology security at BT, the British telecommunications company. His latest book, "Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive," published earlier this year by Wiley, is filled with foreboding: less about technology than about the vulnerability of the heart and mind. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/sunday-review/bruce-schneier-an-avatar-of-digital-distrust.html _______________________________________________ Please be sure to include a URL to the article. Reply to the sender with a "Thank you" if you like this post. _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
