Parallels in road and online safety

When driving licenses were first issued in the UK in 1903 they were purely for identification purposes. By 1931 when the Highway Code was published there were 2.3 million vehicles on the road and 7,000 deaths.

There are now about 27 million vehicles on the road in the UK with under half the number of deaths.

On the digital highway we may be starting to exit the first wild west phase but there is still not much awareness of the scale of risk online or what reasonable and effective steps can be taken to reduce it.

The significant cost savings from digital transmission and storage have been warmly embraced without a full understanding of how leaky some of them are.

Snowden shone a bit of light on this issue but no doubt some other juicy scandals will emerge before some frameworks for regulation appear which are acceptable.