Exploring the law of unintended consequences shares a number of anecdotes about…unintended consequences:
Bruce Schneier, in his excellent Beyond Fear, reports that drivers in Russia have made interesting choices that have not always resulted in improving their situations. Crime is a large and growing problem in Russia, and one of the biggest threats is in the area of auto theft. To combat car theft, automobile owners installed car alarms. The result? Thieves waited until the owner approached the car to turn off the alarm, and then shot him, took his keys, and drove away in the car. Round one to the bad guys. Fine. So car owners quit using alarms, and instead installed security systems that made cars virtually impossible to hotwire. Ah ha! Round two to the good guys. Not so fast — since cars were extremely difficult to hotwire, thieves turned to carjackings instead, which is far more likely to result in injury or death to the car owner. Round three to the bad guys, and once again we see how ‘security’ sometimes serves only to make things easier for the criminals.
This one’s beautiful:
Microsoft has touted its Windows Media Player (or WMP) as an industy- and DRM-friendly app that supports so-called “protected” media files. Basically, if you try to play a DRM-laden Windows media file, WMP checks to see if you have a valid license to do so. If you do, the file plays; if you don’t, WMP heads off to a web site specified by the media file to acquire and download (and often purchase) a license.But guess what? WMP doesn’t check to see where it’s going, or even what it’s downloading, so individuals up to no good simply redirect it to sites where users end up with spyware, viruses, and other nastiness on their Windows machines.
Many safety measures simply convince people to take more risks.