Netizens are provided with such technologies as Customer Relationship Management, Web-lining and Call Centre, and so on; they can by means of these facilities conduct their daily activities more efficiently and effectively, and optimize the outcome of these activities, because they are better-informed and able to innovate marketing, to accelerate business promotion, to enlarge data storage capacity and communication coverage, to increase retrieval facilities, and to improve transaction speed in a more transparent and open environment. But then they will need to rely increasingly heavily on the technologies. While transparency and communication keep on improving, more and more data are consumed and correspondingly generated. This is akin to a vicious circle that “the happier the consumers of information and the higher the demand for more information leading to heavier reliance on the technology”. Or in other words, as the suppliers of goods or providers of services generate more and more data in order to sustain transparency and maintain the market share thus gained, the consumers demand more and more information after having enjoyed good bargains, and consequently, the technology expands storage capacity to process the increase in volume of the data generated, and upgrades processing power to handle the increase in complexity of the applications required. This can be called a technology-driven information-intensive phenomenon. (See Figure 1).
The consequence of the technology-driven information-intensive phenomenon is good and bad. The good is the accelerated arrival of such technologies as Big Data, Cloud Computing, Internet of Things and social engineering tools. These technologies enable integration of massive, scattered datasets, efficient interpretation of the integrated data, and speedier communication of the information. An obvious benefit is that with a huge amount of information being made available, the cyber-world becomes more transparent and netizens are better informed. And the bad is that there emerges numerous additional security threats bred in the loopholes in the new technologies, in the use of them or in the facilities enabled by the massive volume of data they generate, which the cyber-miscreants are ever lurking around to exploit when detected. However, it is noteworthy that some clandestine activities which are brought to light, for example, the Snowden episode (South China Morning Post, 2013) and the Panama Papers leak (Wilson, 2016), can be beneficial to some people/organizations and adversary to others.
Figure 1. A conceptual graph of the circle and the phenomenon