Public Health and Cybercrime: Facebook
A long while back (almost 3 years ago) I wrote about how fighting cybercrime is similar to public health and that - since much of the cost of having an infected computer is born by others - we need public action to incentivice (through monetary support or regulation) safer computers and particularly the use of virus scanners.
Not surprisingly no government has taken steps in this direction - but today Facebook is: once they see evidence of a user's computer being infected with a trojan or virus they will shut the user out and require him or her to run a (web) virus scan. They also offer free 6 months subscriptions to anti-virus software.
I'm not a fan of Facebook in general and some doubt whether it is right for Facebook to take this role - but its about time that the mainstream awakes to the the fact that a large portion of the cost of not protecting your computer is born by others - by large websites that are attacked and by the whole society that has to read all the SPAM and is affected by crimes depending on SPAM and by DDOS attacks.
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