A story about Jessica.
I want you to imagine someone for me. Her name is Jessica and she is 17 years old. She lives in a two bedroom apartment with her mother and uses an old laptop she got from one of her mom’s ex boyfriends. With it she browses the portals that serve as her connection to the community forcibly constructed around attending the same high school. She is concerned with boys and love and the next rent payment keeping her and her mother in this apartment.
She doesn’t have the money for a new laptop. She doesn’t have the money to upgrade it. She doesn’t even know how you do that. She has other interests, like biology. She just worries about how she would pay for college, if she can keep her grades up enough to get a scholarship somehow.
The only person she knows in her whole life that’s good with computers is Josh, in her English class. She knows she needs an antivirus, so she asks him. He gives her an option that costs $50 a year, but he notices her sudden discomfort and kindly mentions about an antivirus that’s free. When she goes home she downloads and installs it. It took some effort and it seemed complicated and took awhile, but there was now a reassuring new icon in the bottom right of her screen that says “Protected” when she hovers the mouse icon thing over it.
Jessica hears on the news all the time about companies being hacked and photos being stolen. She heard on CNN you’re supposed to have a complex password with something special in it, like a dollar sign, so she does. At least on her Facebook account - she doesn’t know and isn’t interested enough to find out how to change her email or other account passwords. That sounds like such an investment of time, and she is busy enough focusing on reminding abstract strings of equations in Math class. She doesn’t want to remember another abstract string of numbers and letters for passwords. Besides, she’s a teenager, whose brains aren’t very good at planning or compensating for risk.
She heard about something called a password manager, but she knows not to download things from the internet. They’re her passwords and she doesn’t know what to trust them to. She doesn’t have a community to ask. And, besides, she’s trying to figure out what to wear to her date with Alex on Saturday and worrying if he’s going to like her. Or if he’s going to break her heart, like the others.
Sometimes she gets prompts to update software. But one time, she updated something called Java, and suddenly after clicking the blue E that gets her to Facebook a new line of icons appeared. She doesn’t know for sure it’s related, but she’s kind of suspicious. But the computer still works, and she doesn’t want to break anything trying to figure it out. She can’t afford to pay Geek Squad $200. It’s annoying, but it’s still working. The next time something asks to update, she’ll say no. She doesn’t need any new features, especially ones that make her Facebook window smaller. And if they were important - wouldn’t they just install automatically?
One day, Jessica gets an email that says it’s an eviction notice. And it says it’s from tennantcommunication@hud.gov. She knows what HUD is by the forms her mother fills out to help pay for the apartment. But she heard about opening unknown files on the news, so she goes into detective mode. She types in hud.gov and it’s what she thinks it is. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Just like it says on the forms her mother gets. She browses the site - it doesn’t look like anyone in Russia wrote it. So she opens the file. Adobe Reader opens, but the file plainly says that if the document is empty, there’s nothing to worry about. She tries to go to the next page, but there isn’t one. Oh well. It’s 7:42PM. She has to leave for her date.
What Jessica doesn’t know is the white light on her laptop that started coming on is the indicator for the camera that’s built in. She doesn’t even know it has a camera. But that camera started recording her. And the software recording her camera also started recording the screen. Including when she was emailing the pictures she took for Alex when she fell in love with him. Luckily, when she types in passwords they always show up as black dots. Even if someone was behind her watching, they wouldn’t know the password. But she doesn’t know what a keyboard driver is. She doesn’t know her keyboard was being recorded, too. Nothing told her. Once in awhile she hovers her mouse over the antivirus icon and it says Protected. It’s the software Josh recommended, after all.
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What is Jessica’s sin in this story? Was it not educating herself on the benefits of Open Source philosophy and running Linux - which is free? Was it not having friends or family that know a lot about computers that she could ask for advice? Was it not befriending Josh? Was it being someone who has other priorities in life? Was it not knowing that the companies providing her software updates also try to screw her over with junkware, and she needs to uncheck it - every time? Was it stupidly not knowing the era that SMTP was designed in and that it doesn’t provide any authentication? Why didn’t she put tape over the webcam? Why didn’t she take apart the laptop to remove the microphone?
Maybe this isn’t her fault. Maybe computer security for the average person isn’t a series of easy steps and absolutes they discard from our golden mouths of wise truth to spite and further victimize the nerd underclass.
Perhaps it’s the very design of General Purpose Computing. And who built this world of freedom, a world that has so well served 17 year old Jessica? You did. We did.
So whose fault is it.
