Outdated Assumptions - Connectivity Hunger

Behaviours developed in a state of scarcity may cease to be appropriate in a state of abundance. Our stone age ancestors struggled to get enough energy-rich food, so they acquired a taste for food with a strong energy hit. We inherited a greed for sweet and fatty foods, and can now stuff our faces on delicacies our stone age ancestors never knew, such as ice-cream and cheesecake.

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So let's talk about data. Once upon a time, data processing systems struggled to get enough data, and long-term data storage was expensive, so we were told to regard data as an asset. People learned to grab as much data as they could, and keep it until the data storage was full. But the greed for data was always moderated by the cost of collection, storage and retrieval, as well as the limited choice of data that was available in the first place.

Take away the assumption of data scarcity and cost, and our greed for data becomes problematic. We now recognize that data (especially personal data) can be a liability as much as an asset, and have become wedded to the principle of data minimization - only collecting the data you need, and only keeping it as long as you need.

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But data scarcity is not the only outdated assumption that still influences our behaviour. Let's also talk about connectivity. Once upon a time, connectivity was intermittent, slow, unreliable. Hungry for greater connectivity, computer scientists dreamed of a world where everything was always on. More recently, Facebook has argued that Connectivity is a Human Right. (But you can only read this document if you have a Facebook account!)

But as with an overabundance of data, we may experience an overabundance of connectivity. Thus we are starting to realise the downside of the "always on", not just in the highly insecure world of the Internet of Things (Rainie and Anderson) but also in corporate computing (Ben-Meir, Hill).

Increasingly, products and services are being designed for "always on" operation. Ben-Meir notes Apple’s assertion that constant connectivity is essential for features such as AirDrop and AirPlay, and only today a colleague was grumbling to me about the downgrading of offline functionality in Microsoft Outlook.

Perhaps therefore, similar to the data minimization principle, there needs to be a network minimization principle. The wider the network, the larger the scope of responsibility. Or as Bruce Schneier puts it, "the more we network things together, the more vulnerabilities on one thing will affect other things". So don’t just connect because you can. Connect for a reason, disconnect by default, support offline functionality and disruption-tolerance, prefer secure hubs to insecure peer-to-peer.

Bruce Schneier again: "We also need to reverse the trend to connect everything to the internet. And if we risk harm and even death, we need to think twice about what we connect and what we deliberately leave uncomputerized. If we get this wrong, the computer industry will look like the pharmaceutical industry, or the aircraft industry. But if we get this right, we can maintain the innovative environment of the internet that has given us so much."

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Elad Ben-Meir, How an 'Always-On' Culture Compromises Corporate Security (Info Security, 2 November 2017)

Paul Hill, Always-on Access Brings Always-Threatening Security Risks (System Experts, 25 June 2015)

Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson, The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What Are the Implications? (Pew Research Centre, 6 June 2017)

Bruce Schneier, Click Here to Kill Everyone (New York Magazine, 27 January 2017)

Maeve Shearlaw, Mark Zuckerberg says connectivity is a basic human right – do you agree? (Guardian 3 Jan 2014)

Related post: Pax Technica - On Risk and Security (November 2017)


Thanks to @futureidentity for useful discussion