Digital faces confidence crisis

Sure, this recent spate of ‘digital terrorism’ has gone after community databases and arguably minor details. But the bigger question it poses about what happens to important personal and financial data must be heard by publishers. And the answer isn’t a quick ‘bung a security firm a hundred grand to patch up our servers’.

The deep and emotional issues around privacy online are too lengthy to debate in these scant paragraphs, but we all understand the bottom-line here. Recent hacks and security attacks are a warning shot.

If the High Street eventually bottoms out as the most doom-mongering of pundits will have you believe, we need a vibrant digital marketplace to step up and replace it. But it has to work in the first place, and be secure and trustworthy, to have any chance of succeeding.