Trust hierarchies in your everyday life
Posted on 2020-02-25 by Alexei Doudkine in Personal Security
Well, it finally happened! Last Sunday my phone died. Proper died, no response, no battery indicator, nothing. It’s a brick. 🙁 Naturally, being a slave to our little black rectangles that we carry in our pockets, I promptly went to purchase a new one and start setting it up. This is where most articles start preaching about the importance of backups, but you already know about that so I won’t go down that road. I will mention that backups did saved me days of my life and leave it at that.
Rather, it made me think of all the little systems that I use in my every day life that I almost never consciously think about and the trust relationships they have with one another. For example, logging into my Twitter account from a new device prompted Twitter to require I validate the new device through my email (Gmail). In this case, Twitter has a trust relationship with my Gmail account and assumes that I, and only I, have access to that email account. I quickly realised that I don’t have access to Gmail anymore. This is where things got interesting.