Why You Shouldn’t Put Things on the Internet
If you have information or a physical device that you don’t want someone else to have access to, connecting such information or devices to the internet greatly increases the chance someone will see or use it. While it’s true that there are ways to protect your information or devices, nothing is 100% secure in the world of computer and network security. Unless you have a good reason and adequate risk mitigation when putting sensitive information or devices online, simply don’t do it.
For example, if you don’t want the fact that you had a few drinks last night or a colourful blog rant in a moment of rage to haunt you in the future, don’t post it online while you still have the control to do so. When information is posted to the internet at large, it is immortalized through the work of countless search engine crawlers, cached on a server somewhere with backup copies, or copied, quoted, stolen, aggregated, translated or otherwise duplicated by who knows who else. Unfair as it is, employers will decide not to hire you based solely on a Google search of all the “cloud-storage” of information on the subject of you. Do you really trust all those privacy policies? What if something happens beyond the control of the policy-maker, such as someone stealing information?
If you’re trying to publish some type of digital work (book, video game, software, movie, etc.) and expect to be paid for it, not 100% of eventual access to your digital work will transfer money through to you. There are almost 2 billion internet users as of 2010, which is 28.7% of the whole world.
While it’s safe to assume 99% of those people are idiots (a pretty safe bet regarding the internet, from what I’ve seen), that remaining 1% still leaves almost 20 million non-idiots that will undoubtedly find a way to get around whatever kind of protection you have on your digital work, and all it takes is one person to figure it out and distribute it freely, before the “immortalization” occurs as described in the previous paragraph. Just look at Wikileaks lately.
The same goes for physical devices and networks. If one smart guy figures out a way in, he can take control, steal files, etc. and the same rules apply as above. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to me to make even the most marginal control of critical infrastructure systems internet-accessible. Have any of the administrators watched Die Hard 4? Bad things will happen! Put everything critical on its own network and guard that instead. With way fewer access points and exposure, the likelihood of something bad happening is greatly reduced.
The funny part about all of this is that if on the other hand, you WANT something to be on the internet with as much exposure as possible (let’s say a blog for example), it’s actually pretty difficult to climb the popularity ladder. I guess that just proves that life isn’t fair, what can go wrong will go wrong, and what can go right probably won’t without a huge amount of work.
If you enjoyed this post, I try to write regular equally interesting posts at my tech blog.
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I've definitely seen some fairly personal things on Facebook. I even have a friend whose sister almost got expelled for FB pictures of her holding a beer while underage. You really can't be too careful. FB has filters for a reason. And its sad how many people don't use them.
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