Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[rachelelise]

Micro

Clearly there is going to be a big dfference between the sensitivity of information on a personal and business drive. But one observation I'd make is that you are far more skilled and knowledgeable about PCs than 99.9999% of users. Consider when I do my taxes. Unless I always use a portable drive, I will wind up with some very personal data on my hard drive. And I have no confidence that it will go away when I say delete. I'm sure somewhere there are other personal items that I don't even know about. My whole email files for example. That by the way is a huge issue for businesses where over time users have no idea what has been saved or arrchived on their machines and definitely not enough time to figure it out.

If you have a desk top at home, then then theft is not a real issue (possible but unlikely) and getting hijacked is also a low probability. But if you have a personal laptop and you travel with it, you probably have an even bigger chance of losing it than a business computer (you are likely to be less careful).

I don't think the average user is dealing with this and most will not jump at a chance to get encryption (some will). But I do think there is an issue and if educated more users would address this and the other issues they face but ignore.

As an aside one thing that really bothers me is phishing. I've concluded that I would be unable to ever tell if a site is legitimate. Thus I don't respond to anything anymore which seems insane. I also have no sense of the risk of responding even if you don't supply much information. If I have this attitude and I'm just below you in terms of computer knowledge (97.5%) I can only imagine what this will do for internet services for adults. I assume kids have no common sense and will do whatever.