Are hackers really the problem when governments can just ask for or legislate the requirement to turn over user data? Russia currently has approximately 149 million people living in within its borders, and while Tinder is not the most popular dating app in the country, even a small percentage of the population could be subjected to exposure by the government.

Couple that with Russia’s desire to establish its own walled-off local internet, similar to China, and privacy and access to information become a very rare commodity indeed.

Privacy has always been a concern of mine to a certain extent. Waaaaaay back in the olden days, as Al Gore was inventing the internet and I was but a mere Padawan in grad school working towards a PhD in political science, the concept of privacy in a rapidly advancing technological age was the thesis I was shaping.

While I left those ambitions behind when I stumbled into the early days of the dot.com era and wound up with a career in technology, those educational influences wound up directing the path I would take into computer security, where the concept of protecting systems and personally identifiable information (PII) still has a strong hold.

We are constantly bombarded by news articles, blogs and blurbs on the local news about the latest breach in security and how many users were potentially affected. It sounds awful, and the impact that an actual identity theft has on an individual can be profound. I don’t know a single person who has not had to change their credit card or get a new account issued because someone managed to skim their information and monetized it on the dark web.

As humans, we have this interesting dichotomy within all of us. We are social creatures, and we crave to (Read more...)