All your examples are still depending on other people to vet things for us. I think that's incomplete. In addition to govt. regulations and brand-based accountability and litigation in court of law and court of public opinion, I think we need last-mile security awareness.
What does this security awareness consist of? Above all, it consists of not blindly taking what you see online at face value. Create relationships with each other. Not parasocial 1:million relationships but real 1:n relationships with real people and talk about security with each other.
You don't need to know about encryption or keep up with new technologies, a very baseline simple thing to do is to try to stay informed about who's trustworthy and who's not.
None of this will protect us when a nation state comes for us, of course. But that's not the goal here. The goal is to outrun more mundane garden-variety predators by joining together with others.
When we drive cars we depend on signs and rules to be established, but we also use our eyes to actually check that the area in front of the car is clear before proceeding. And it works to a great, great extent. I think most people just don't check their surroundings to that extent when they set out for a drive on their computers. They don't have eyes in the same way in the new online environment we're using for the past few decades.
This is absolutely a hard problem. A network of relationships is a privilege, and not everyone has it. But even the people who have access to it don't use it today. It would harden the commons for some of us to start reducing the payoff of bad actors. And the first step in getting there is to say out loud and often my first sentence here: There's really no substitute for everyone thinking carefully about security for themselves. No matter what we put into place at the govt. regulation or litigation levels.
What does this security awareness consist of? Above all, it consists of not blindly taking what you see online at face value. Create relationships with each other. Not parasocial 1:million relationships but real 1:n relationships with real people and talk about security with each other.
You don't need to know about encryption or keep up with new technologies, a very baseline simple thing to do is to try to stay informed about who's trustworthy and who's not.
None of this will protect us when a nation state comes for us, of course. But that's not the goal here. The goal is to outrun more mundane garden-variety predators by joining together with others.
When we drive cars we depend on signs and rules to be established, but we also use our eyes to actually check that the area in front of the car is clear before proceeding. And it works to a great, great extent. I think most people just don't check their surroundings to that extent when they set out for a drive on their computers. They don't have eyes in the same way in the new online environment we're using for the past few decades.
This is absolutely a hard problem. A network of relationships is a privilege, and not everyone has it. But even the people who have access to it don't use it today. It would harden the commons for some of us to start reducing the payoff of bad actors. And the first step in getting there is to say out loud and often my first sentence here: There's really no substitute for everyone thinking carefully about security for themselves. No matter what we put into place at the govt. regulation or litigation levels.