Hacking - contrarian view
Along with 147 million other residents of the United States, my SSN, DoB, and email address was stolen from Equifax.
According to Have I been Pwned, my email address has been knocking around in the Internet's netherworld otherwise known as Dark Web for years now. In 2016, LinkedIn lost my email address, Adobe and tumblr: in 2013. Dropbox and Last.fm cost me my email address in 2012.
Yes, it's unnerving to hear that your email address is now available to for anyone to buy. Even more scary is that our hashed passwords are also available for purchase.
So, you may ask, what exactly is the silver lining? What contrarian view could you have which can make me feel better?
At an individual, I don't have any silver linings to proffer. At the societal level, every breach shows a fault line between old technology and the new world domain we find ourselves in.
Where once threats to our data were hyper local - a fire, a break-in, inadvertently misplacing records, maybe egregious malfeasance were the worst of it - today, our threats come from everywhere and sometimes, all at once.
This new threat model needs brand new responses. The reason why SSNs were considered sacrosanct was that no one could have imagined stealing one hundred and forty seven million of them from anyone. But someone just did it and just like that, our world has changed.
And now that the world has changed, the silver lining is that new technologies and paradigms will have to be imagined and then invented to survive in the new world.
Maybe we will just remove all notions of privacy. Imagine a world where literally nothing is hideable - anyone with a computer can key in your name and pull up how much money is in your bank account and how much debt you have. And oh, that bank account's number is also out in the open for anyone to see.
Maybe we will decentralize everything while retaining privacy. Let people manage their own data and educate them on security best practices. Any data breach will only affect one person while the rest of humanity will carry on peaceably.
Maybe we invent systems where service providers and consumers meet off site and exchange one time use keys which governs their interactions? I can't even begin to describe what this looks like but we do have a near parallel in the real world. Some police jurisdictions allow people to trade goods in their parking lot watched over by CCTVs. Can we build something like that but for the virtual world?
Anyway, as you can see, these hacks are not just an attack on you. They are also hacking away at the edifice of how things used to be. I find the future that awaits us exhilarating. I can't wait to see who invents it and leads us into it.