The taxpayer is by far the biggest victim of E-Crime: both directly and indirectly: from £150 million looted from the Individual Learning Accounts to a £billion or so from automated VAT and Benefit fraud to the computer-managed mortgage fraud that helped bring down the former building societies - plus the tax revenues on the lost profits to business from crime against the private sector.
More patients die because their medical record was wrong than because it was not available. More suffering and injustice are caused because police, justice and care records are not fit for purpose than because they are insecure. There is a very old rule of thumb that about 10% of records will have random errors unless entered by those with a vested interest in their accuracy and in a position to know what is correct. That is not the case with the records on many public databases.
We all like a good laugh at past predictions of the future. I have just been given a copy of "Twenty Years On: Life with Micro-electronics in the Year 2000 - text of an article to appear in the September 1980 edition of Video-world: the magazine of electronic living". This time I was the butt of the joke. At least I had begun the article with "A forecast is a pretence of knowing what would have happened if what does happen hadn't."
I recently listened to a headhunter describing how he googles applicants and trawls social network entries, bypassing any privacy settings. I would never put anything on a social network entry that I would not put in this blog, but this morning was startled to received a piece of spam addressed to a pseudonym that I have used on only one blog.
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