Schools Should Teach Data Security

A reader sent in a email recently wherein he told of fixing his brother’s computer. In the process of doing so he saw chat logs his teenage niece had on the machine. He was stunned at the content. She had been telling all kinds of personal information to what could easily have been strangers.

As anyone with any IT background can attest they are frequently called upon to fix computers for friends and relatives. More often that not it was due the fact that little Billy or Jenny had downloaded something they should not have. But, did they know any better? Nope. No one told them that it could be a problem.

This morning I noticed a topical article on The Guardian Unlimited:

Here’s an interesting fact: the junior official who burnt all that benefit data onto those two infamous CDs was born when the Data Protection Act came into force in Britain – 1984.

If the Tory government then in power had had its wits about it, by the time he or she got to secondary school (in 1995, just as the internet was taking off), the computing curriculum would have been compulsory and included something about the importance of data protection and security. “Security” isn’t something that Microsoft just discovered with Windows Vista. It has been at the core of the Unix operating system and its siblings for decades.

Instead, schools have taught computing in the dreariest way imaginable, failing to prepare children for the electronic world as it really is. As a result, it must have seemed like the most logical thing in the world to that junior official to burn a couple of discs – you know, like you would with some music you downloaded off the original Napster (which was all the rage when s/he was 18) – and stick them in the post. Security? Data protection and responsibility? What the hell are they?

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[tags]Data Security, Teach Kids Data Security, Security Education[/tags]