Former President Gerald Ford once noted that any government big enough to accomplish everything you want will be big enough to take everything you have. A similar observation might be made of the combination of technology and business. Think about the history of how technology has become an integral part of business, especially large businesses.
I’m not that old, and I can remember when people traveling abroad actually arranged for letters of credit with foreign banks, a concept that is not only unnecessary today, but not even the faintest of memories in the minds of most people. I can also remember when there was essentially no interstate banking, and when “charge cards” – essentially the forerunners of today’s credit and debit cards were essentially local or limited to accounts at a single business, such as an oil company. The first “national” credit card was the “Diner’s Club” card, launched in 1950, but a national credit card system didn’t develop until the mid-1960s, and it was close to a good two decades after that, if not longer, before credit cards were a feature on a world-wide basis. Today, you can use a debit or credit card for a cash withdrawal/advance in most large cities across the globe and not have to carry hundreds or thousands of dollars in travelers’ checks.
Of course, none of this would have occurred without massively large banks, and massively large banks with nationwide and international outlets and connections aren’t feasible without technology and high speed computers and networks.
But progress comes at a cost… and that cost is vulnerability. The same technology that allows you to withdraw cash from your New York or Denver or Charlotte bank from where you are, whether it be Amsterdam or Buenos Aires or Sydney, also makes it possible for a hacker in Ukraine or Bulgaria to tap into your account. The same technology that allows you to buy and sell stock in minutes from your home computer is the same technology that allows programmed trading systems to do so in milliseconds and crash the entire New York Stock Exchange in minutes when the slightest thing goes wrong. The Obama Administration is pushing for national centralized and computerized medical records, something that already exists in many states and hospital networks, in order to allow you to receive better treatment if you fall deathly ill or are injured away from your home… but that technology is far more susceptible to misuse than the “antiquated” paper files and charts that were once only located in your local hospital and your doctor’s office. With the growth of the new technology has also come a massive growth in medical records fraud, especially involving insurance and government medical programs.
The point is simple. Technology multiplies everything, both the benefits and the liabilities, the gains and the thefts, and because it does, unless a technologically “improved” system is designed to minimize abuse, abuse will multiply faster than benefits. But… all the abuse prevention systems and passwords have the effect of making to harder to access the new technology – so that most of us who have any online presence or business needs either have password after password or court fraud and abuse by using simple passwords or employing only one or two for everything. And that, of course, increases vulnerability.
So it’s no wonder that the total cost of electronic-based fraud is skyrocketing. Not only that, but the “official” totals don’t even include the uncounted personal time lost in dealing with such problems as spam and would-be fraud… or forgotten or mistyped passwords.
Yes… we have progressed… but it’s been a great deal more costly than most of us realize, and it’s likely to get more so… not less.