In my last job, I struck up a conversation with the guy tasked with provisioning my mobile phone and laptop. He was working in IT support but said he really wanted to break into information security. Later, I spoke with my friend, the CISO, and mentioned the guy. …

It’s no secret that data breaches have become so common that people tend to think, “Oh, another one,” and get on with their lives. What is surprising is how few executives of Internet companies we trust with our data have responded with better authentication to protect users. Ironically, some of…

A human resources guy I respect said something today that really hit home: when you’re discussing corporate values, listing the word, “Integrity” is really odd — if you need to list that as a corporate value, you’re really starting behind the meatball in terms of your hiring. …

A few times a year, we’ll hear on the local news the story of some cop who takes it upon himself, or a group of cops who get together from a sense of charity, to provide something wonderful for a member of the community. Maybe it’s Christmas presents. Or shoes…

Once, I was involved in an effort to break some bad habits. Among them, there had developed a cultural reliance on people who had become single points-of-failure. I say a “cultural reliance,” because one guy who had emerged as the single-point-of-failure of some seriously critical things — the one person…

When I see things like someone calling the cops because a black man is wearing socks in a swimming pool, I remember why we made the @StreetCredPKIC database: so that there would be data about this. In our book based on the PKIC data, We pointed out that in more…

You may have noticed a mountain of spam over the past month, telling you in breathless terms how the privacy rules are changing on every website you’ve ever visited. That’s the most obviously noticeable part of the GDPR. GDPR — it stands for General Data Protection Regulation — is the…

Oh…and there’s no such thing as Santa Claus — Facebook’s business model is to sell information about you to advertisers, and that is how they make their money. The rule on the Internet and in publishing is and has always been that, if you can’t understand how they make money, then you are the product. Consider that in March…

If you’re surprised at the data Facebook keeps on you, you’re gonna love this. — As I watch the world having conniption fits over Facebook “privacy,” and discussions on the Twitters get increasingly breathless, I wonder how it is possible that people haven’t understood the value proposition provided by Facebook. Like my friends in advertising, who refer to newspapers as “People who print come-on content…