In his comment yesterday, J. Peterson sensibly argued that in a future world where your very appearance is mediated by cyber-technology, someone who means you harm could conceivably hack into the system and alter the way people see you.
I would argue that there is solid historical precedent against this. Society has been more or less tolerant of hacking when the consequences are low. But once the stakes get high enough, various legal, social and technological mechanisms start to kick in. This response is not dependent upon any particular technology or historical era, but is instead a fundamental characteristic of all functioning societies down through the ages.
For example, if you are like most people in Western cultures, the bulk of your wealth is kept in a bank. These days, there is no actual pile of cash representing the size of your bank account. Rather, your money is represented as a set of binary digits in a secure computer account, in a bank that answers to government regulation and oversight.
Both the government and the citizenry are well aware that if our collective bank accounts were successfully hacked, the result would be chaos and perhaps worse. And so safeguards are put into place.
The same thing will happen when your very identity depends upon cyber-security. In theory somebody could hack into the database and erase or modify your perceived identity. But in practice we as a society are not going to let that happen, short of an event that leads to complete social and legal breakdown.
And if that were to happen, we would have bigger things to worry about.
Ironically, I saw this post the day after the bank robo-called me to let me know my credit card was compromised, so they cancelled it and sent a new one. This happens once or twice a year now. Clearly, credit card fraud security is pretty low; the main safeguard in place are the rules protecting you from liability as long as you report the issue in a reasonable length of time.
Unfortunately, the more serious crime of identity theft is still a rampant (over ten million cases last year). Those victims spend months or years putting the pieces back together.
Right now it’s sort of an uneasy truce: the banks spending billions to cover fraud because it’s cheaper than overhauling the security system; consumers using the cards because they’re more convenient than cash.
How all this extends to virtual identity security is going to be fascinating (and perhaps frightening) to watch unfold. Thanks to Mr. Snowden we’re now more aware the rivers of personal data are running pretty deep and pretty far.
Actually, it sounds like your bank has pretty good security. They pro-actively found breaches and fixed them for you.
Imagine instead being a victim of a crime as a patron of a bank with ‘perfect’ security. The situation is Kafkaesque. How can you be a victim if the security is perfect?