Fear

At the risk of antagonizing younger readers (and many may fall into that category, The popular abbreviation of 'FOMO' or Fear of Missing Out is not new, at least not in the human mindset. Although, i acknowledge that its use on social media has popularized it.

It is considered to be a preserve of the individual or small groups, who are anxious about possibly missing out on some interesting or exciting activity. However, it has been a driver in business, probably for centuries and continues to mushroom and it can impact a number of facets but here, i'm going to focus on Security and Safety.

The words secure and safe can and are often used inter-changeably and the emotion of fear is hard coded into human kind and is inextricably linked to our fight or flight instincts. And in essence, in any given situation, if we feel safe and secure, we should not experience the emotion of fear. Going way back in time, our primary fear was for safety, from predators or aggressors, security entered the fray over time as we developed and acquired assets of some description.

Latterly, we have for some reason tried to differentiate secure and safe, with secure or security more widely used for logical instances, while safe or safety is used more for physical instances. I can see no real logic for this other than the business commercial drivers that exist, Either word, should invoke the thought of no imminent danger to people or assets.

Now technology had given us many benefits to make us feel more secure and safe in different areas from Volvo developing seat belts for cars and making them freely available to other car manufacturers, to smoke and fire alarms and automatic fire suppression systems, to mention just the minimum.

Health and Safety (physical) has rightly grown into an industry itself, especially in the workplace, primarily due to the high loss of lives, serious injuries etc suffered by so many.

Logical security is a much more fickle topic and more prone to interpretation and potential misuse in an ironic way, in part by an ever growing need for compliance, whereby it has, to some extent created a cyclic economy of its own, which has potentially been ceased by some to create a vicious loop of sorts.

To provide some context, i'll provide an example of one of my early introductions to security in the technology space. This was still in the infancy of its introduction to some extent (yes, that long ago) but anyway, i was attending a training session on the security features of a new product and i was slightly surprised to hear the instructor say at one point 'dont talk to me about real security, unless there is someone standing there with a loaded gun'. I knew that the instructor came from a military background, so i put it down to that and the course continued. This was at the time when passwords and encryption was still rather new.

However, in terms of personal security/safety, has anything really changed in the intervening decades, when you see politicians, royalty or celebrities, do they not still rely on police, army or private security? Curious perhaps..

Back to logical security, as technology has evolved, so have our habits. There was a time, when our money, belongings etc were kept in our homes, garages, sheds etc and some indeed still are but less so. Lots of people now depend on software, either on a watch, mobile, phone, tablet, laptop etc and therein they have applications where they control there virtual money. The days of physical banks and large steel safes etc are on a rapid decline on most parts of the world.

Our homes are often protected by alarm systems, cameras, sensors, as is much of the infrastructure that we depend on, which can be monitored by us (or others) from remote locations. All of this is dependent upon three primary things, power hardware and software.

And the software, ironically seems to be our biggest risk, its seemingly vulnerable to ever increasing attacks and hacks, in spite of assurances when we procure it that it was 100% secure. The it is further compromised by the need for companies to comply with the most up to date software releases and industry standards.

If we are lucky, the software updates are free but then manufacturers decide that they can no longer support x and the new y will have an additional cost or in more extreme cases, a provider can remotely change the software, which has a detrimental effect on the performance of the device, resulting in a new purchase or accepting degraded performance.

To a large degree, FOMO has driven this because with the advent of the 'next big thing', once one large company has confirmed that they are using it, many of their competitors follow suit, primarily because they fear of missing out on something, even if they don't know what the something actually is. This is just the more recent expansion based on FOMO in the business world but it has existed for generations with the drive for competitive advantage or not wanting to miss out.

Ironically, one of the industries that resisted this for the longest was the finance/banking arena, they were well known for 'sweating their assets', understandably so because in their business, ROI is key and although i know a few are still clinging to some antiquated systems, most i believe have transitioned. Beyond ROI, their reluctance was driven by another type of fear, which was fear of failure. They had systems that they have invested in heavily over decades and moving away or investing further in something they couldn't be sure would be as reliable, was a difficult move to make, as that kind of potential would have had serious consequences for many.

We have all contributed to this environment but can we and should we consider changing the parameters?