Safety

While neither the Japanese nor the American narrative anticipate developing infrastructure and services, the European perspective emphasizes the citizen as a complex being. According to Maslow, the feeling of security is the second-lowest floor of the pyramid of needs. First of all, you need to feel physically saturated (have something to eat, drink, breathe, sleep, etc.), and in the next step, you need to feel safe. It is, therefore, one of the basic human needs that cannot be ignored or addressed. After all, even at the government level, security has traditionally been a demanding budgetary requirement. As Hobbes states, the state is established (also) to provide security for its taxpayers.         

This security in cyberspace has some crucial implications that need to be mentioned. The first is the already mentioned feeling that there is “here and there": that cyberspace is not as dangerous as the physical world or that they are inseparably separated from each other. This notion can be very dangerous, whether in the area of ​​personal data protection or financial protection.

It is essential to realize that the base currency in the online world is not money but personal information. Many people think that it is so ordinary and necessary that their data cannot interest anyone. The opposite is true. Obtaining data on “regular users" clearly has excellent economic potential, for example, for marketing purposes. The fact that users' data is of great value is problematic for many of them to imagine, affecting their behavior.  

As in the Hobbesian conception of the state, so in cyberspace, it is true that part of security must be provided by one's foresight and experience, and interest can be taken care of by the state by law and power. The problem is both components of security are understood in this way. Foresight and experience is something that many people do not have well-developed in the online environment, and cyberspace requires, in many respects, specific behaviors or at least technical details that are ultimately key to security. The relatively limited ability of nation-states to ensure their cybersecurity is also a problem.    

The big question here is what to imagine under cybersecurity. At present, it is perceived primarily as a set of the following areas - protection of the network as an infrastructure; security of basic registers and other essential state systems; fight against misinformation and protect against targeted attacks on large sites on a large scale. 

According to the European Commission, security is also essential for other reasons that we perceive as important. The first is the economic and educational dimensions. Confidence in technology is closely linked to a sense of security. If the creation and development of the information society are to be encouraged, it needs to be based on an understanding of (legitimate) security. That is why various European projects and strategies aim at this security.     

The second dimension is the civic one - the state perceives its role as a guarantor of security and, at the same time, cannot ensure the safety of citizens who do not have sufficient education or experience in the field of digital competencies. The EU issues a relatively large number of digital regulations aimed at maximizing consumer protection as a citizen. Probably the most debated and powerful instrument in this area is the GDPR Directive. This was widely reflected in the media and put into strange contexts of senseless regulation and unnecessary bureaucracy. However, it must be borne in mind that this is a directive aimed primarily at large corporations, which collect a considerable amount of data and then store and process it often without the users' explicit knowledge. The aim of the directive is, therefore, to protect consumers as citizens of the Union.     

This is closely related to the relationship of privacy and personal data protection as an essential element of the functioning of civil society - personal data and even minor details can have in the broader context a substantial impact on democracy or the free functioning of society in general. One can mention the KGB, which conducted many interrogations precisely to obtain a large amount of“unimportant information". The ability to communicate securely, to be sure that data used for economic purposes will not be misused or stolen, is essential for the use of technology.  

The European environment strongly differentiates (whether it is one of the key social influences of Christianity) between private and public space. Each person must be equipped with competencies in order to be able to manage what he wants to put into the public space and what to keep hidden. This awareness that we can differentiate between these two spaces is a fundamental and essential element of our social experience. The claim that “everything we put on the internet is public" is very dangerous in this regard. It shows the Internet as a dangerous place (I can just as well watch a person at home using an unsecured IP camera or spy device) and at the same time as a place that goes entirely beyond cultural narrative, which is also not true.

Therefore, the goal of digital competencies about security is to set up an online environment in which it will be possible to cultivate a civil, economic, and information society. Every citizen will be able to secure the part of security that the state cannot provide for him. 

In our description, we will move from device to data, from hardware and software (and networks) to the data that individual users create, to look at the social and environmental aspects of security.