Surveillance: awareness challenge or opportunity?

We're busy preparing February's security awareness module on the topic of surveillance.

As often happens, what we anticipated would be a fairly narrow and specific issue has mushroomed before our very eyes as we've delved into the writing. We're now looking at surveillance on the population by the authorities, by the organization on workers and third parties, by third party organizations on workers, and by individuals on each other ...

The awareness module covers a fascinatingly diverse patchwork of information risks e.g. industrial espionage and intelligence, health and safety, network and physical security monitoring, oversight and supervision, privacy and confidentiality, office security, things, portable devices, artificial intelligence, hacking, malware and more. We've covered all of them separately but this is our chance to bring them together - an awareness story with with a novel perspective.

The news story about a TV presenter's verbal comment allegedly triggering Alexa to order dolls houses through Amazon's Echo thing fell into our lap just a few days ago: if people haven't even bothered to configure their gizmos so they don't order stuff without their confirmation, what's the betting that they don't realize they are being silently monitored 24x7? And it's not just Alexa listening-in, not by a long chalk. Look around you right now: how many microphones and cameras can you spot? And how do we know there aren't more surveillance devices, tucked away inside the high-tech stuff that increasingly surrounds us?

If your security awareness program is tedious and ineffective, perhaps you need to get out more! If that's not an option, get in touch: we've got the boring bits covered (researching and preparing creative copy) leaving you the fun of interacting with your fellow employees, delivering and emphasizing the key messages. Surveillance is one of ~60 topics in our bulging portfolio, all designed to intrigue, inform and motivate workers to value and protect information.