Wild - The Personal Digital Resilience Handbook: An essential guide to safe, secure and robust use of everyday technology

The Personal Digital Resilience Handbook

An essential guide to safe, secure and robust use of everyday technology

Dr David Wild

WCI Publications

Copyright 2020 Dr David Wild

All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Cover design by: Art Painter
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America

Contents

About this book

The Personal Digital Resilience Handbook :

An essential guide to safe, secure and robust use of everyday technology

mydigitalresilience.com

Copyright 2020 by Dr. David Wild

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The content of this book cannot be distributed, in any form, or offered as an electronic download, without permission from the author.

First Published: November 2020

The information in this book is distributed on an As Is basis, without warranty. The author has taken great care in preparation of this book, but assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of the use of the information or programs contained herein.

Rather than use a trademark symbol with every occurrence of a trademarked name, this book uses the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner, with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

Web addresses and menus selections are shown in bold. As shorthand, when describing navigation of menus on a computer to achieve a task, I will separate each part with a > symbol (arrow). For example, Apple menu > System Preferences > Users & Groups means to select the Apple menu, then select System Preferences, then select Users & Groups.

About the Author

David Wild is Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indiana University where he researches and educates in crisis technologies, digital resilience, data science, data privacy, security and ethics, and biomedical data science. He is founder of the Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab that is researching and developing new digital technologies for the front line of emergency and disaster response.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Eva Galperin for introducing me to the term digital resilience, Michael Bazzell for not only the inspiration of his excellent books on privacy, but also his This book was self-published technical guide to self-publishing which provided the framework for publishing this book. I am not sure this book would have happened without that support. Thanks are due also to Sue Wild and Don Gregory for providing feedback on the first drafts of this book, and to my whole family and friends for consistent, loving support.

Introduction

I was first introduced to the term digital resilience in a breakfast meeting with Eva Galperin, Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). I was struggling to find a term for what I saw as an urgent and growing need for technology to be used in a different kind of way, a way that is more robust and reliable, and with more control over how we use it and what it does. I dont claim to have a monopoly over the use of the term, and others might use it differently, but I define digital resilience as steps people and communities can take to make their use of digital technologies more robust and less prone to critical failure . To the extent the term has been used, it has been mostly focused on business processes as an extension of cybersecurity. My interest, and the emphasis of this book, is in personal digital resilience, that is how we as individuals, families and communities can use technology in a way which mitigates the vulnerabilities and risks of using technology in the modern world.

Digital technology is incredibly powerful. The Internet has enabled a grand, global experiment in meeting our basic and advanced needs digitally instead of in more traditional corporeal ways. A massive, global infrastructure of compute servers and storage has been constructed by a relatively small number of companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft, to power this experiment. Others such as Internet Service Providers and cellphone companies create the communications infrastructure to connect these servers to each other and to us. Service companies provide a treasure trove or maybe a Pandora's Box of applications layered onto this infrastructure. Food, clothing and lodging can now be purchased using a just-in-time logistics system that is itself dependent on the infrastructure; we get a job through LinkedIn, we Google our medical symptoms, we contact our neighbors on Facebook, and we obtain love and belonging on Tinder or Twitter, where we also gain or lose our self-esteem. The whole system we might call it the Global Cloud is now considered essential to our way of life. The Global Cloud has brought many benefits, such as enabling remote work, access to huge amounts of information, and convenient delivery of goods we might not be able to access locally. It has also brought problems, such as excluding those who do not have access to the necessary technologies, almost eliminating privacy, enabling cybercrime and state and corporate surveillance, and enabling monopoly corporations to undercut local businesses.

As I write this, we are in the midst of the global COVID19 pandemic. This has taken us to a level of critical dependency on the Global Cloud that would have seemed extraordinary less than a year ago. For many, it is now the primary source for meeting even basic needs, such as to interact with neighbors and colleagues for work or recreation, to get safety information important to our well-being, and to order goods. Both the benefits and problems of the Global Cloud are now amplified across the world. It is unclear how much this acceleration will persist once the pandemic is over, though it is likely that the Global Cloud will continue to grow unabated.

As well as being powerful, digital technology is also fragile, and this is a big concern given our dependence on it. Most of us are driving at 90mph down the digital freeway in cars that have no seat belts and with rusted axles that could break at any time. Barely a day goes by without a horrendous cyberattack that disables a corporation or a municipality appearing in the news. Until recently this was mainly from distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks which would take a website or server offline for a few hours. Now we see much more devastating ransomware attacks where hackers take over and encrypt entire systems, demanding a ransom to decrypt them. As I write this a news story has just broken about a large national healthcare provider that is completely crippled by a ransomware attack, leaving it unable to run operations at its hospitals. These attacks happen to people like you and me too. Most of us know someone who has experienced a smaller-scale attack, maybe an identity theft or having an online account breached. Even when we are not under direct attack, we are under a kind of indirect attack on our brain. Companies collect huge amounts of data on us from the technology that we use, and they employ it to try to make us more valuable to them by modifying our behavior. This can take the form of selling our data to third parties, or using it to customize the content or advertisements we receive.