Is our personal data safe… in the hands of government?
The US Customs and Border Protection says that information from a database run by a subcontractor on an undisclosed of people who have entered the country, including in many cases vehicle registration, photograph and fingerprints, has been stolen; confirming predictions made by security experts long ago.
Meanwhile, the UK government has canceled a scheme to require age verification to enter adult websites after realizing about the potential security risks that compiling such type of information could entail.
All of which raises questions about just who is looking after information we provide not to a private company, but our governments. In a world where everything, and that means everything, can be hacked, the very least we should expect from the authorities is that our personal data is encrypted, making it useless should it fall into the wrong hands. Is information held in government databases under these conditions? How does the public sector compare to the private when it comes to data security?
Computer technology is evolving at light speed: what will happen when quantum computing makes all current cryptography systems obsolete? What would we do in a world with no sure way to encrypt information? Fortunately, we don’t have to answer these kinds of questions from one day to the next, but a range…
