The weakest link

 

“We can't make humans that much better.” Is that a statement from an extraterrestrial, divine or not, who resignedly determines that man is 'finished' and that we have to make do with the current model? Is Generation Z (the 'Zoomers') our final destination and is that letter anything but coincidence?

Nonsense. It is a statement made by someone at a security conference and relates to the role of humans in the fight against digital crime. You know, phishing and stuff. The tenor of the story was that we've already put so much energy into raising the security awareness of our colleagues, friends, relatives and complete strangers that the job is now done – it doesn't get any better than this.

That is of course not true. At least not quite. We have to keep going with our mission anyway because new people are still appearing on the face of the earth. And those new people have to learn from an early age how to move safely through the digital world – through their world, because Generation Z is pretty much born with a smartphone in hand. This includes special attention to privacy. It’s so easy to give up your privacy completely with your own hands, even without doing it very consciously. The 'yes go' button is always bigger and nicer than the 'no' button when you get to choose whether a site can store cookies, whether an app can "sync" with your address book (a blatant euphemism for copying), whether they can use your location. 'Yes' is the easy answer, 'no' gives you extra work while you want to get started right now with that site or app.

In fact, it is not too bad with that extra work. If you indicate somewhere that you want to adjust the cookie settings, those settings should be set to 'off' by default. You then only have to click on 'save settings', without the burden of checking all those settings. But beware: here too a tempting button appears that says 'Allow all', next to a much less conspicuous link to save the chosen settings. In addition, at some settings you will also see a separate setting, which is called 'legitimate interest' and is turned on by default (or can't even be turned off). That term in quotation marks comes from the GDPR, in which legitimate interest is one of the legal bases for processing personal data. Companies often consider direct marketing to be a legitimate interest (“otherwise we can't make money”), but privacy experts don't seem to agree on that yet. By far the most pleasant to me are sites that, in addition to 'accept everything', also offer the option 'accept nothing'.

Some people are completely fed up with security and privacy. Those are the people who neither want nor can play along. Cyber ​​criminals often target the elderly, but it is far too easy to claim that the group lost to awareness activities is only populated by the elderly. My mother is 88 and very alert to digital craziness ("Patrick, what should I do with this?" is a regularly recurring text in WhatsApp, accompanied by an image of a screen on which a choice has to be made). In that regard, generations A to Z can still learn a lot from her. But there is not much credit to be gained from most total objectors. Incidentally, I know very little about them, but that may be because they are outside my bubble.

I brought back another quote from that same conference, which ties in nicely with the first: “People are not the weakest link, but the most vulnerable”. Look, that's a statement after my heart. You cannot blame an individual for the fact that technology is not yet sufficiently capable of protecting us against digital inconvenience. Humans are vulnerable in two ways: on the one hand, they are unable – just like security software – to unerringly separate the wheat from the chaff, and on the other, it is the same human being who will ultimately be the victim. Because even though it may initially be about hacking a computer, in the end it is about the files of or about people. Even when it comes to corporate espionage, people get hit, namely the people whose secrets are stolen.

So people are vulnerable, and it doesn't get much better if you combine the two quotes. I refuse to accept this, because apart from the total objectors, we can really achieve what is necessary through information and conviction, right across all generations. Let’s just do our best.