{"id":4659,"date":"2016-04-28T15:38:18","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T15:38:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=4659"},"modified":"2016-04-29T15:47:43","modified_gmt":"2016-04-29T15:47:43","slug":"its-the-year-2020-hows-your-cybersecurity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/its-the-year-2020-hows-your-cybersecurity\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s the year 2020…how’s your cybersecurity?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven Weber<\/a>, University of California, Berkeley<\/a><\/em> and Betsy Cooper<\/a>, University of California, Berkeley<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

What if, in 2020, wearable devices did not care about how many steps you took, and instead were concerned with your real-time emotional state? With networked devices tracking hormone levels, heart rates, facial expressions, voice tone and more, the Internet could become a vast system of \u201cemotion readers,\u201d touching the most intimate aspects of human psychology. What if these technologies allowed people\u2019s underlying mental, emotional and physical states to be tracked \u2013 and manipulated?<\/p>\n

Whether for blackmail, \u201crevenge porn<\/a>\u201d or other motives, cybercriminals and hostile governments in this world would find new ways to exploit data about emotion. The terms of cybersecurity would be redefined, as it became more important for people to manage and protect how their emotions and mindsets appeared to the monitors.<\/p>\n

This is just one of several potential future cybersecurity scenarios dreamed up by a group of multidisciplinary experts recently. Here at the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity<\/a>, we asked them to think about what we could see happening in the near future of 2020. These are not predictions \u2013 it\u2019s impossible to make precise forecasts about such a complex set of issues. Rather, the scenarios paint a landscape of future possibilities, exploring how emerging and unknown forces could intersect to reshape the relationship between humans and technology \u2013 and what it means to be \u201csecure.\u201d<\/p>\n

And they raise pressing questions we should consider today as we lay the groundwork for a secure information technology environment in the future: how might individuals function in a world when they are no longer able to ignore the fact that literally everything they do online will likely be hacked or stolen? How could the proliferation of networked appliances, vehicles and devices transform what it means to have a \u201csecure\u201d society? What would be the consequences of almost unimaginably powerful algorithms predicting individual human behavior at the most granular scale?<\/p>\n

Imagining scenarios<\/h2>\n

At the heart of our approach is scenario thinking, a proven methodology<\/a> for identifying important driving forces and unexpected consequences that could shape the future. This approach often leads to more questions than answers, but what we identify can help guide us toward solutions as society and technology evolve.<\/p>\n

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\n In 2020, will we all be wearing this many biosensors? What might they measure?<\/span>
\n doctorow\/flickr<\/a>, CC BY<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In our scenario about emotion-sensing, for example, many questions arise:<\/p>\n