Wait, what?
Computerworld is running an article predicting that at some point in the future a new breed of computer malware will be able to steal your “reality,” basically screwing over your whole life (somehow).
Computer scientists warn there is a new malware lurking in the distance that will slowly steal your reality by mining your social network for private and behavioral patterns. A victim of a “behavioral pattern” theft cannot easily change his or her static behavior and life patterns.
I read their article, and then I read the paper on which it is based on… and I failed to see what the danger was, or make any sense out of “stealing reality.” Other than being mad (envious) that someone could at some point gather enough information about a large number of people and make a huge amount of cash out of it, I don’t see any threats in anyone knowing my “reality.”
Facebook already knows the “reality” of hundreds of millions of people, and so does Google and other big companies, but nobody (who is sane) is concerned that the information they have about them is posing a threat to who they are, because it can’t (unless you’re really stupid, in which case it’s not them who are the threat, it’s you).
There are many stories in recent years of “reality” information being stolen and irreversibly be put in the open. In 2008, real life identity information of millions of Korean citizens was stolen in a series of malicious attacks and posted for sale. In 2007, Israel Ministry of Interior’s database with information on all of the country’s citizens was leaked and posted on the Web. Just these days, a court sill has to rule whether the database of bankrupt gay dating site for teenagers will be sold to raise money for repaying its creditors. The site includes personal information of over a million teenage boys. In all of these cases, once the information is out, there is no way back, and the damage is felt for a long time thereafter. – (emphasis mine)
Seriously, what damage? Were all those gay teenagers in the closet? Is the street address of people so valuable and private?
I get the feeling that these corporate security experts are just envious their hacker brothers are making a lot more money than they are, so they are attempting to make them look evil.
If a malicious attacker steals and then leaks or sells your behavioral patterns, what are you going to do? Tell your mother or your boss that your reality was stolen and you can never talk to them again? Most people cannot change their network of family or friends.
If someone would steal and sell my behavioral patterns I wouldn’t do anything, because I wouldn’t be worried about it. Talking to my mother or my friends isn’t some sort of critical information about my life, and if someone knows I do it and can sell that information, good for them. Just because someone can profit from random information about me doesn’t make it a threat. And since such information is only worth something when it is about large numbers of people, it is worthless to me anyway because I can’t sell it myself.
So really, WTF is the threat?
