Dec 21, 2014

The peculiar star of the Sony hack: Email

From CNET

The peculiar star of the Sony hack: Email

By Richard Nieva

The massive hack has raised questions about First Amendment rights, privacy and cyberwarfare. But there's a subtler issue at play when we look at all the news stories that have come from hacked inboxes: Why do we put this stuff in email?

Every summer, Coye Cheshire teaches a workshop to incoming grad students on how to be smart and careful on social media.

The class, held in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, involves letting students know the repercussions of posting things on networks like Facebook and Twitter. But Cheshire doesn't mention an online medium even more basic than social media: email.

"We sort of treat email as a given," said Cheshire....

Cheshire said he hopes news of the hack will motivate people to be more vigilant about what they say in their digital communications. "My hope is it might be a reflection point, that people might think more carefully," he said.

But while that's his hope, his research as a professor at Berkeley — he focuses on the role of trust in online interactions — stands against him.... "Most people think, 'Thank God that didn't happen to me,'" he said. And then they don't change....

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Last updated:

October 4, 2016