“There’s a clash between cybersecurity and privacy that can have serious consequences”
My name is Davey Winder and I’m a cybersecurity specialist. No, I’m a privacy specialist. Hold on, maybe I’m both. It’s certainly felt that way of late, with the amount of time I spend focusing on privacy being roughly equal to “pure” cybersecurity matters. Indeed, I’ve started to realise, and it’s far from being something the cybersecurity community is agreed upon, that the two are increasingly convergent.
One thing nobody can deny is that there’s a clash between the two that can have serious consequences when the sticky stuff hits the fan: the impact of one on the other can’t be ignored. The subjective right to privacy at the individual level overlaps with the more objective risks of a security incident. As one of my security research and penetration testing friends says, cyber isn’t a silo. This is demonstrated nicely by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which produced a Venn diagram (pcpro.link/327nist) to illustrate how cybersecurity risk contributes to the management of privacy risk and vice versa.
By way of a real-world example of what I mean, let’s look at how the CIA can impact your phone apps. Not, not that CIA, but rather
