When I first started spotting articles about the PSN failure I was not exactly worried, because it was not part of my PS3 game life. Furthermore, where I live PSN purchases are allowed only via points and not through direct credit card transfers. I used to get angry at Sony for not covering smaller markets and allowing customers there to take advantage of all PSN services, but now this seems more like a blessing.
Today I read that a guy in the USA has launched a class action suit against Sony (it was in German, so here I link to a similar article in English), claiming the company had handled the personal data of PSN users with negligence. Although I am not directly affected by the PSN “disaster”, I strongly support all of the 77 million people who were and hope the issue will be resolved quickly.
I was discussing the lawsuit with Dilyan today and we were arguing about Sony‘s investment policy in terms of security — with him saying they had obviously decided to cut expenses particularly in data security and me refusing to believe it. At the end though he managed to convince me that probably the company had to keep low the costs for PSN security and the network as a whole, because it was not a service bringing Sony a great deal of money.
Later this evening when going over our discussion I was once again troubled by the thought of online security in general. How careful are we really when registering for stuff online? How many of the people using PSN had second thoughts before signing up?
We put all our trust in online service providers and website admins, because shopping online is so much easier and hassle free and online multiplayers could be so much fun. However, there are always security risks. Should we not take some part of the responsibility? It is scary how much of our personal information is floating around the web, waiting to be picked up by someone. I have actually had the need to raise awareness about the dangers of exposing too much online to several of my co-workers who had put personal info and pics on Facebook without restricting access to it, even though Facebook in particular has made big changes in order to protect its users. I myself am aware of how much exposure I have on the net, but have to admit that when I shop online I rarely think about how secure is to give credit card information to the websites. I just assume “it is all taken care of”, which now sounds very naive to me.
I reckon we should make an example of the PSN case and I hope this would lead to consumers thinking and speaking out before and not after the fact.
