The intricate relationships that humans have with the technologies they build are at the foundation of the creation of hacking as a societal problem. Technical advancement, a distinguishing feature of modernity, has created as many issues as it has solved problems. While computers and robots have been seen as providing respite from filthy, dangerous, and monotonous work for decades, they have also been viewed with some trepidation in terms of their potential to displace and even dominate humans. Computer hacking is built on a foundation of debates about the costs and hazards of technology in general, and information and communication technologies in particular.

In general, public awareness and computer technology have two sides: on the one hand, it provides tremendous opportunities to broaden our mental horizons; on the other hand, it has a negative connotation: folks might feel frightened by technology’s complexity, and as a result, dread losing control to technology. So it’s possible for computers to cause existential uneasiness in people. The sharp edge of that overall concern is people and computer hacking (Taylor 1998).

Threats to privacy, public and private property, and trust are at the heart of hacking as a societal concern, both actual and imagined. I’ll simply give a quick overview of each danger here because the rest of the article will go over them in greater detail. First, there’s privacy: we have personal information that we want to keep confidential, much of it in the form of digitized data that helps us go through our personal and professional lives more easily.

In a world when so much of our lives are conducted online, having your identity “taken” is a legitimate concern. Many of the technologies that support our collective life are extensively computerized and linked by networked infrastructures that may be hacked. Hacking can affect people’s confidence in a negative way. Our modern network society is built on trust: faith in technology creators, technology regulatory agencies, and any users of these systems who follow proper processes and rules. Some types of computer hacking erode trust by making potential and existing users of systems frightened of being victims of an attack, and by making individuals who might benefit from ubiquitous information technology reluctant to utilize them. People who are afraid of being hacked frequently set restrictions on what they do online, and as a result, they miss out on some of the benefits of online social networking, online shopping, and healthcare.

Hacking has been labeled as a sort of deviance in some circles. In order to see hacking as a deviant action, we must alter our perspective away from a legal point of view to one of activism and dissent. Deviance is defined as behavior that challenges social and cultural standards. Now, social and cultural norms are in constant flux, and there is never a universal agreement on what is acceptable and what is not; however, some norms are agreed upon, and those who deviate from them are labeled as deviants (Becker 1997; Curra 2000). A lot of what is done in the name of computer hacking is labeled as deviant behavior at some point and as acceptable at another. And the hackers who have been labeled as deviant have challenged those norms.

The digital land’s views are more liberal and modern than the real-life ones. Many consider concepts of property and ownership are irrelevant for digital assets and they believe information and therefore knowledge should be made freely available for all of humanity. Consequently, some aspect of hacking is just “liberating” information guarded behind-closed-doors by circumventing the digital locks. The concept of intellectual property is the source of many heated debates and has legal and social implications. Disagreements result in conflicts between people who view themselves as liberators of humanity and companies and governments that regard themselves as protectors of intellectual property. This situation is one of the most important and common outcomes.

There’s another type of hacking that is focused on the creation, sharing, and modification of free and open-source software. This appears to be different and unrelated to cybercrimes. After all, open-source hackers operate in the open and share their code and skills; so what’s the problem? To answer that, we must first define “free” in the context of free and open-source software. Berry (2004) and Söderberg (2008) define free and open-source software as the ability to inspect and modify the source code. Given that most of what is seen as problematic about hacking include circumvention digital protections, it is important that we recognize that not all hacking activity, including many types of free and open-source hacking, is harmful to society. However, it is not always simple to distinguish between free and open-source hacking and cybercrimes. For this reason, the term “hacking” is used to describe creative pursuits and “cracking” for cybercrimes.

To conclude, what constitutes cybercrimes are constantly changing. The digital world is in its infancy, so we may stumble and even fall but shall never limit ourselves for the pursuit in technological advancement is one of self-improvement — something that is core to what it is to be human.