I doubt I’m the only one to find that when things go wrong, they tend to go wrong in the worst way possible. 
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a solution to the problem that could be easily found, but it does mean that at first glance, it seems like things couldn’t really get any worse. 
I have my fair share of tales to tell. I think that I have a fair sense of direction but that often means I only know one or two routes to get to a destination so if I come across a road that is closed and I’m forced to take a diversion, then all bets are off as to whether I end up in the right place or not. 
Thankfully in this wonderful age of technology, that is often remedied by setting up the satnav and allowing it to recalculate the route as I keep driving on a road to nowhere or pulling over to consult a maps app on my phone where I can work out where to turn to get myself back on track. 
The thing is, I put my whole faith into those pieces of technology and blindly believe that they’ll tell me the right way to go and keep me safe. Pick up a calculator and you just assume that it will give us the right answer every time, never considering that one little bug in the software could change a digit or two meaning that an answer could be out by thousands. 
That’s the big problem – we all just assume that things are going to be working perfectly when we use them but that isn’t always the case. As the saying goes, to assume is to make a donkey out of you and me, or something along those lines at least.
The attendees at the Conservative Party Conference made that mistake last weekend when they put their faith in the official conference app. It was a very simple set up – only an email address was needed and as long as that correlated with one on the database, then the person was logged in. The striking problem there was that no password was needed and so anyone who could make an educated guess at an attendee’s email address would be able to log in as them. Being politicians, many MPs simply used their parliamentary email address which can be found online within a few seconds.
The result? A monumental data breach. Profiles that had been set to hide personal details were suddenly open for anyone to view and thus private mobile numbers became public knowledge within minutes of this loophole becoming known. For senior members of the party, this brings about serious security concerns as mobiles can easily be used to track the whereabouts of a person if only you know how. The likes of Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Sajid Javid all reported being plagued by unpleasent phone calls. 
Some of the hackers used the opportunity to show certain party members just what they thought of them and decided to update their profiles while the opportunity was there. Boris Johnson was just one who fell victim but possibly was one of the worst hit as his profile picture was changed to something much less appropriate for public viewing.
It’s not good news for the government at all. Despite Brexit, we are still part of the EU for now and following the recent GDPR privacy updates, they’re looking at a hefty fine for this blunder. It could amount to several million so May and her friends had better start looking down the back of their sofas to scrape it together. 
Speaking of Brexit, it also calls into question how exactly they plan to deal with the question of our Border. Your guess is as good as mine as to what the plans for that actually are, but any time the matter is raised, the Brexiteers cannot give us any answers other than they do not want to see a ‘hard Border’. When pressed, they either repeat themselves or try to answer a completely different question so I’m not convinced that there is any plan at all. 
We can only read between the lines and speculate that there is to be a technological Border but seeing as they cannot even ensure that a simple mobile app is secure enough to hold personal details safely, how on earth could we trust them to be able to keep a steady flow of movement for people over here? One small blip in Border technology could see thousands of people erroneously placed on a watch list because they’re crossing a few times a week. The common sense of a human would say that they’re probably living on one side and travelling to work or school but the digital era lacks that so those frequent crossings would flag up as illegal smuggling or something. Come summertime, we’d all be scuppered and the all we’d be carrying would be a carload of sand after a day out to the beach!
A hacker can do a lot of damage with the details that were uncovered in that app but with swift action, that can be avoided. 
The Border problem isn’t going to be something so simple. Come next March, it could be our freedom that is at stake should anything go wrong.