Cybercrime: a natural human adaptation of information technology

Although computer crime and security breaches are a fact of life some consumers still retain unreasonable expectations about the security of data online. Those expectations will require improved surveillance and dataveillance that could lessen individual privacy more than it already is.

Surveillance, privacy and dataveillance are interwoven with the individual legal, civil and democratic rights of the general public but the upsurge in web-based cyber crime has made those rights saleable commodities in the information age.

Information technologies like searchable data bases and data mining enable agencies to reveal where you have been on a mobile phone or, by using a piece of software, are able to analyse your path as you click your way through the web. Psychological profiles can be easily built from that information and those profiles in turn become commodities saleable to the highest bidder. So the erosion of individual privacy continues unabated.

Increasing cyber crime, along with surveillance, dataveillance and the steady erosion of privacy, has become one inevitable human dimension of information technology.