Today, I was preparing a roundtable for the first week of March to discuss around Cybersecurity. There would be 5 professionals from different sectors and companies and we will be discussing from cooperation between private and public sector to the need of cyber talent in the European countries. Believe it or not, I had suggested the participants to start our conversation with a «soft» question in terms of technology but very complex ethically speaking. The question that I suggested was, «where is the balance between security and privacy ?».
Suddenly, this afternoon, I started reading about what the US Government asked Apple to do and not just how Apple reacted but moreover, how Apple shared with their clients in an open letter published in their corporate page, the request from the Government and their position around that request.
Apple position is going to open a huge debate in the media and in the society and it will make each individual think.
Apple disrupted an industry and in a way, disrupted a society that used to live in a complete different way. We do not store pictures at home; we don´t keep our family videos in a hard drive; we don´t take in our bags loyalty cards any more; we don´t carry our credit cards with us either; We have our IPhone, our Passbook, our Apple Pay …everything stored and safely kept not just in the handset but also in the cloud, and protected by our fingerprint and many times by a two-factor authentication. We have our lives in our handsets, including… love, health, money and even our sins…
But what happens when we are asked to open all of that in the benefit of security? How much of our private lives are we willing to share, to expose or to open? Would we be using our phones and Apple services in the same manner if they would provide the «key» to our lives? Where is the border when security goes beyond privacy?? Terrorist alarm? Core Custody? …who draws that line??
I don´t have the answer in this post, but I will like to link this debate with one of the ideas that I defend non stop around Digital Transformation : Renaissance and blended world.
In all these debates around regulation, new legal frameworks, physical vs digital, the right of the clients vs the responsibilities of the corporations; the life of the driver vs the live of the pedestrians… we need people who provide the world with many different points of view of the same problem so as a society evolving and advancing into an uncertain future, we take the decisions, hopefully the right decisions, after having analyzed as many points of views as posible, putting human beings, society and our lives at the center of all those
decisions
Let me say Bravo to Brave Apple and their smart way of transforming a huge issue into a great communication opportunity … Again you acted smart !