With the frequent announcement of security breaches at large and small companies that barrage us each day, one would think that no computer network is secure. As I've frequently argued, that is likely true. However, we hear about more and more breaches because there are more and more Information Systems to be breached. Even with all of the global super-hacker geeks, the vast majority of security breaches still happen thru inadvertent leaks on the part of people who have authorized access or disclosure of passwords that allow unauthorized people into secure data.

I tell my Indianapolis small business computer consulting customers that we can take all of the precautions that are considered reasonable and then monitor suspicious behavior. It doesn't guarantee that a breach won't happen, but it's the most we can do. Lately, a bigger concern for me has been the change in attitude toward personal information security. The generation that is growing up on Web 2.0 has a completely different view of privacy than those of us who are a part of the baby boom. We get suspicious of people who want to know too much information about us without giving us good reason. They get suspicious of people who aren't willing to share every intimate detail of their lives with anyone who casually asks. When they are in charge, we'll be asked what we're trying to hide when we ask for privacy.

I spoke at a memberhip meeting of the Indiana Construction Association a couple of weeks ago. The topic was social media marketing, but we expanded it to include other aspects of online marketing. At the end, one of the attendees came up to me to say that his network support staff discouraged them from using social media sites and he was glad. He said he wasn't sure he could trust himself not to expose corporate secrets "in the heat of the moment" online. If more people thought like him about managing themselves with respect to private data, much of our fear of privacy loss would go away.