Information Technology

What could be the problem with your phone keeping track of your location and sending that to Apple or Google?

What if someone hacks the Apple or Google site?  Or hacks your phone?  Or merely gains physical access to your phone for a few minutes to grab the file that has the tracking data?

“I’m not breaking the law” I hear your say.  Fine.  Let’s consider a few other scenarios.

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Might be time for all of us to pay more attention to privacy issues on the technology we use. This has not been a good week in terms of privacy developments.

Using an iPhone or phone in the Android family? Did you know your location is being tracked regularly and reported back to Apple and Google?

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So you are taking backup data off-site on a regular basis.  Good. 

Your key staff person faithfully makes a daily backup of your server to a portable hard drive.  Once a week this person dutifully brings in the portable hard drive used for last week’s daily backups.  As directed, this person disconnects the portable drive with the newest data from the server, plugs the other one in to the server, then puts the drive with new data in her backpack to take it home that night.

What else could go wrong?  Do you see the risk?

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What could go wrong in this picture?

Your church has three portable hard drives that are used to back up the server data.  Every day one of your faithful staff dutifully swaps out the portable hard drive and makes a new, complete backup of your server.  When a backup is complete, the portable hard drive with the fresh set of backup data is put on the shelf over the server, where it belongs.

What’s the problem?

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Various tales of disasters arising from people hitting the ‘reply all’ button were told in an article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.  Simultaneously entertaining to see other’s embarrassment and fear-inducing that you could do the same thing.   I’d like to give you a link so you can read the full article, but it looks like the WSJ doesn’t like that idea anymore. 

Got a great idea from the article you might enjoy:

Move the ‘reply all’ button so you can’t accidentally hit it.  Also requires a more intentional effort to choose that option.

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Can you see the danger here?

A ministry faithfully backs up their computer data every day. They have two or three sets of media.  Perhaps it is a tape that’s swapped every day or several different thumb drives that are alternated. When it’s time to make a new backup, the staff person faithfully grabs a backup media, making sure it is the oldest backup, puts it in the computer and successfully makes another backup. Next day the process is repeated.

What’s wrong?

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