Our reliance on electronics and electronic storage is a problem. There are people who cannot do math without a computer, write legibly let alone grammatically correctly, or find anything if it's not easily available in Google or wikipedia. The IRS encourages us to file electronically because it's easier for them but cannot guarantee that our information will be secure. Several banks have reported that their databases were hacked and that customer information was stolen. Let's not forget the big Facebook snafu when they were accused of being leakier than Senator Pat Leahy.
I have long been suspicious of digital media. I may have already mentioned how, in graduate school, I saw digital devices used to obfuscate date to either delete or obscure things that were either problematic to the conclusions or allowed the researchers who found it to work on it before anyone else got a chance to investigate interesting but unexpected results. There was a time when digital pictures were not permissible in court because they were easy to doctor. There are entire companies dedicated to information security and a new military operational specialty directed to protection of electronic information.
There are other problems with electronic data storage. We who are old enough remember how easily you could wipe a disk or hard drive by waving a magnet close enough to it. Electronics are subject to different kinds of environmental forces that either decay or destroy the integrity of information, and every time you move a file it loses at least some of its fidelity. Then there is the problem that electronics are only as good as the people who write the software and then use it.
People are part of the problem. I have a cousin who gets paid to sort out problems in code written by others. I can only imagine how frustrating that might be when you have no idea what you're reading or what they intend and must look at every character to find perhaps the one parenthesis that is left open in the wrong place that unwravels everything. Then there are users. Today, we heard about a baby killed because information was typed incorrectly into an electronic form. The automated machine followed orders and basically this baby was killed by a robot. So much for the three laws of Isaac Asimov...
The problem is that the more we rely on electronics the more we are at the mercy of efficiencies in a system that just does what it is programmed to do. Electronic records are easily lost, doctored, omitted, deleted, or missing. Electronic safeguards are no panacea, since they are written by people, the same people who have trouble with paper records or with the imput of data into computer programs.
This potentially dangerous situation has been highlited in science fiction movies and novels since after the close of WWII. Still, they see it as a miracle drug that will solve all of our problems and want to force us into it. About two years ago, I was working on one of my books and very near to completion. A computer error corrupted the file, and since it was my only copy of those particular edits, I lost 50 pages of work which I have not been able to duplicate. How would you like to be deleted from the system, to simply be erased because you're not in a database? Think about it. Technology is a tool, not a safety net. Plus, what do we do when the power goes out?
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