Summary
For future prosperity, we can’t afford to have people lose trust in technology.
In the second in our interview series, #PaladinExperts Sir David Omand and Prof. Ciaran Martin raise concerns about the ease of hacking into the Internet of Things and the impact of anonymity. They discuss the meaning of trustworthiness and its value to both companies and customers.
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Transcript
Here’s the full transcript of the video:
- Ciaran Martin: When Her Majesty the Queen officially opened the National Cyber Security Centre. We demonstrated how we could open a voice-controlled door by hacking into a doll that was a cloud-based service that told stories to children. It also showed the risks to public trust, in a period when I don’t think we can afford for the public to lose confidence in technology. Trust is important.
- David Omand: I don’t necessarily myself use the word trust. I prefer trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is a quality that a company has, or a government, or an individual, a minister, has through consistent behaviour in which truths are told, what is promised is delivered. If you measure how pressing it is by how much damage is being done today, then the ability of the attackers to conduct their attack anonymously is clearly, I think, a real problem. So anonymity on the internet is built in, but it’s something that makes bad behaviour on the internet, including crime, far too easy.
- Ciaran Martin: The way companies manage risk needs to improve. There’s still too much of a sense of trying to protect everything without really understanding what matters, and that gives rise to a whole host of cybersecurity problems. I think that you can sum up … in two words: trust sells, or sell trust. I think there’s a real commercial opportunity which provides some significant social good in promoting technologies that are seen to be trustworthy and safer and, … that can only be done through transparency.