Hypertext vs. Papertext: Security

Security has been one of the hot topics in the last year or so on the Internet. Is the Internet secure? How secure is it? What sort of information is safe to transmit over the Internet? How can we make it more secure? These are some of the big questions that have been floating around the Internet community, and especially the business community on the Internet, recently.

So just how secure is the Internet? No one is really quite sure. Many of the veteran Internet users think that there is little danger of data being captured. They transfer their credit card numbers without a worry. On the other hand, the White House has a front-page policy with email. What that means is that they never send anything out via email that they wouldn't want printed on the front page of the newspaper. These seem to be the two extremes of thought. Most Internet users are willing to send out just about any comments and words, but no valuable information, such as credit card or bank account numbers.

My personal feeling is that the Internet, in general, is fairly secure. I would still use caution when sending confidential or sensitive data, but I think your biggest worries are users and administrators at your own site. They have direct, unencoded access to all messages that you send. Some places read your email; others don't. So don't say anything in email that you wouldn't want your system administrator to know. I would also recommend against sending any truly sensitive information over the Internet. I think the chances of anything being intercepted are slim, but there's no sense tempting fate.

Another issue of security is brought up on the page about permanence: how can you protect yourself from someone else copying your page and altering the text to show something that is not, in fact, on your page. This is a tough issue. One way would be to constantly archive everything. Of course, a court of law would realize that you would not give them the archived page with the false statements on it. Another way would be to use something like PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). This is a program which encodes your entire message based on a private key. A public version of your key will then decode the message into an actual message. You could run this on each of your Web pages before putting them up. This PGP-encrypted version could then be stored in a separate file or in comment fields within your Web page. There is really no fool-proof way of protecting yourself, but anything you do is better than nothing.

Another legality issue that comes up with security is again related to credit cards. What if you put up a Web page for your company and allow users to purchase products or services via the Web. You might ask them to submit a credit card number to process their order. Now, what happens if their credit card number is stolen during that transaction? Since you asked them to send their credit card number, can you be held liable for it? As of yet, there have been no court cases relating to this, but the issue could come up. In the interest of your own safety, you might consider putting your own warning about the security of the Internet on the page where you ask for a credit card number.

As you can see, there are many issues of security involved with the Internet. It is a very hot topic, and many companies are working on bettering the security of the Internet. It will be quite awhile until the Internet is a truly secure place. So, until then, make sure you protect yourself.

Which path would you like to follow?

Next:	Full-Text Path	Legal Issues	WWW & the Internet
Previous:	Full-Text Path	Legal Issues	WWW & the Internet

Return to Introduction	Table of Contents