For this week’s cover story, Bridget Read talked to people who have lived the nightmare of having every single thing they’ve ever done online become public knowledge. We’re getting used to hearing about this happening to public figures and people tangentially related to them — Blake Lively et al. — and also to corporate bigwigs like Sony-leak victim Amy Pascal. But it can, and does, happen to completely average Joes, too. Maybe it’s time to lock down all your stuff? Or at least change your password so it’s not “p@ssword!” I talked to Bridget about how we should be thinking about “privacy.”
The security expert you interviewed said we should quit using WhatsApp. Do I really have to do that?
For you and me, we’re not gonna start there. We're gonna start with our passwords. You wouldn’t believe the amount of people I've heard from today who are like, “Oh my God, my password is my name plus 123.” What is more likely is that you would be one target among many, and so even having a semblance of resistance is actually what’s going to make a hacker move on. They’re gonna find your password in a data breach and then they’re gonna think, Oh, maybe Emily uses that for her bank, and we have her bank because of other data-broker stuff that we’ve found elsewhere. That’s a more likely scenario.
Okay, so what else should I be worrying about?
Well, if your texts do leak, it’s probably going to be because someone targeted the software you use. And we all just use the same ones. Having only five big tech companies is a huge problem for all of us, because it means that all of it is centralized and all of it is controlled by a very few people, and we have put our fate in their hands.
There’s a case you mention in the article where an employee is suing for wrongful termination after his employer found out, via a hack, that he’d looked at porn on his personal devices. What do you think will be the outcome there? Also, that’s terrifying.
Bringing your own device to work is a huge problem for all of us. So many legal experts I talked to said they’re shocked at how many companies do not give their employees phones, even huge Fortune 500 companies that can afford it. It’s a problem for them because we use our phones more casually than we would a work phone, and it's also a problem for us because they can use what we do on it to retaliate if they want to.
You learned that Amy Pascal doesn’t use email anymore at all. I found that detail fascinating. Do you think more people will adopt that approach? Also, who can afford to adopt that approach?
The biggest implication of all of this is that the people who have access to the most sophisticated privacy technology — which is going to include walled-off networks where nothing is being hardcoded on anybody else’s cloud or servers — that kind of thing is going to be available to tech overlords, some sophisticated celebrities, and the wealthiest people in the world. That’s going to be an enormous luxury: True privacy.
