Generations Continued

Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking about things I wanted to include in a follow-up to a post I wrote earlier in the week about younger workers and internet security. And then I opened up my Google Reader and found this New York Times Op-Ed about the challenges of putting young people in personnel, and decided I really had to make a couple of points today. This may go long. I hope you'll bear with me.

1. I think some folks misinterpreted my post on IT security to conclude that I was saying that younger people are more open so technology should be altered to accommodate their lapses. What I meant to suggest is that many young people are more open about what they're willing to put online, and that openness sometimes get misinterpreted as laxness. I actually think young people are probably pretty good about keeping secure the things they want to keep secure. I doubt you'd find that young people inadvertently breach security on their online banking or credit card accounts, for example. Younger folks have grown up with passwords for everything, and with the concepts of strong passwords, too.*

If you transmit something through a connection that you think is secure, and it gets hacked, it's not your fault: it's the hacker's. People who get their credit cards stolen by cameras at gas stations are no more to blame for that than Paris Hilton is to blame for whoever hacked her Sidekick. In an increasingly far-flung but interconnected world, there is eventually going to be no alternative to transmitting sensitive information electronically. To do that, we need to build technology that justifies our trust in it AND teach smart security practices. The two concepts go hand in hand.