Who Can You Trust In A Digital World?

Who do you trust to guard your treasure?

Whether we realize it or not, we make personal trust decisions every day. Our choices can and often do come back to bite us in the….. pocketbook.

We don’t always stop to acknowledge that the choices we make and the partners we choose are often really just surrogate security guards who we assume or presume will keep a close watch over our personal financial backside.

Remember the days when you could fall asleep at night without worrying whether the doors were all locked? Chances are, the older we are, the more we long for those days when our stuff was safe sitting on a park bench while we fed the ducks. Those days are gone.

I’ve been overwhelmed lately with the growing realization that I am totally dependent upon others for the safety and security of most of my material possessions. I suppose that’s why my prayer life improved as my family grew. I began to realize that I really don’t have eyes in the back of my head.

On a larger scale, scholars and engineers from the University of California at Berkeley’s T.R.U.S.T.  research team, are developing new standards and technologies to address everything from phishing and spyware to critical infrastructure privacy protection standards for government and industry. Partners include Stanford University, Cornell University, IBM, Symantec, Cisco Systems and the National Science Foundation.

Security expert Mikko Hypponen was quoted in a recent CNN.com article.  The piece took a look at the size and scope of the sinister global malware marketplace and the threat it poses to our continued and uninterrupted enjoyment of free internet access. “Our generation is the first generation that got online. We should make sure this resource will stay around for future generations.”

Families, small business and privacy conscious individuals can protect their infrastructures too. By carefully choosing the guardians at the gates of our private world, we can fend off threats with the same confidence that many well-funded organizations enjoy. Here’s a good start.

Carefully choose and then follow the security advice of vendors you have learned to trust:

Your Internet Service Provider (ISP)
Your computer’s Operating System (OS) manufacturer
Your credit and debit card issuer
Your checking account depository or bank
Your cell phone’s vendor (increasingly more vulnerable than PC’s these days)
Your security vendor (Norton, McAfee etc.)

Folks, these are the careful decisions you can consider to make your private life more secure. What price do you put on trust? Who you trust matters.

You can bet the bank on it.