How do you keep data secure?

The best answer I’ve come up with so far is not to give it to anybody. Of course, in our digital age, this is probably not a tenable solution. Being able to search though photos, chat with friends or find your way to places sure are handy, something impossible to accomplish without granting some level of data access.

The second best answer I’ve come up with is not to give all of it to anybody. And, by “all of it”, I don’t mean literally ALL of your files. Instead, I mean, don’t give anybody all of any individual file.

<aside> 💡 Now, I’m going to go well beyond my knowledgebase on this one, though minimally when I’ve talked to people who would know more about these things, they’ve generally been like “yea, sure, sounds plausible enough”. Whether they were just saying that to get me to stop talking, well…

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My general understanding of how encryption works is you have some type of file on one end that then gets blargled up into indecipherable goo based on a secret key that only you know which can only become decipherable if the thing trying to look at it also knows the secret key to reinterpret it.

As an example, think of a message where A = poop D = dog K = cat N = fly. So, you would write DANK which would be translated into “dog poop fly cat” and could only be returned into DANK if the thing opening the file knew how the words mapped to letters. Otherwise, they would be left with “dog poop fly cat” which, in addition to the need to make a more clever joke here, is otherwise not very valuable to anybody.

So, with that poor encryption description out of the way, in addition to encrypting the individual file…

<aside> 💡 Which, oh yea, will be rendered obsolete when quantum computing becomes readily accessible. And, who knows how advanced it already is, I’d imagine the state is not sharing all of that knowledge with us lowly plebes.

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