An unfortunate accident.
Written on March 13, 2009
… suffered by a BBC blogger. (A web application showed someone else’s photo on his post, not the one he posted. )
But yet again I’m putting my trust in a social web application, which is obviously a risky thing to do. I’ve long realised that social networking is a public activity and you can’t put anything online – thoughts, images, jokes – without assuming that you are giving that data to the entire world. What I hadn’t realised is that you could be at risk of showing someone else’s data, however offensive, on the web in your name. And that is really very frightening.
The story here is not that some random web 2.0 application by some random independent developer had a bug. (If that constitutes news, then boy, do I have some stories to share)
Applications have always had unfortunate bugs, I dare say they always will. The game hasn’t changed, but the stakes certainly have.
This is a story about growing up. Imagine a small boy deciding to trade in his cap gun for something a little bigger, and lifting a magnum off the shelf. The parent later comes to the gunsmith, “Your magnum backfired and killed my son!” The anguish caused by faulty manufacturing is lamentable, but it’s by no means all that there is to the story.
We’re currently in the process of adopting communication and publishing media which are vastly more powerful than anything we’re familiar with. We’ve felt the heft of a real gun… and we’re never going back.
Playing with magnums is perfectly fine (and a lot of fun) if your body armour is thick enough and broad enough. The real question is, “Can we build armour that foolproof?”
Filed in: technical.
He’s shocked but I bet you a lot of people who read the article are not. One of the side effects of this sort of thing is probably that the value of personal information becomes less and less. In the past a picture of you was horribly horribly personal. Now it might randomly show up somewhere else due to a bug. Explaining to others it was a random bug is an increasingly acceptable excuse in a digital age.
As the shock value wears off and this sort of thing becomes more common I think it may well be taken less seriously by society.
Woah, woah! Hold up, sparky! You’re stealing my next post in the series.
You’re absolutely correct. Society will readjust itself, and as systems prove themselves unreliable or dangerous, we will reduce the trust we have in them. We’ll start to filter the things we make available, and we’ll start to regard stuff we see online with a healthy skepticism.
The thing that bothers me are is that we haven’t adjusted ourselves yet, and I think we’re now in a transition period with significant potential for abuse (present and future).