Prediction #1 — Everyone gets the crap scared out of them by data security problems. In many ways this was set up by 2014, a year when, between Edward Snowden and Target, America woke up to the dangers of lax data security. Where this year is somewhat different, I feel, is in the implications of these threats and how they play out. There will still be data breaches and, though there will be proposals how to retool to avoid such problems in future, I don’t see those turning into anything real before 2016. So 2015 will be the year when people claim to fix your problem but really can’t. Watch out for those crooks.
2015 will also be the year when the bad guys start to see their own profit squeeze and respond by doing exactly the things we hope they won’t. To this point, you see, the folks who steal all this information have been generally wholesaling the data to other bad guys who use the data to steal our identities and money. Only the buyers aren’t really that good at stealing our stuff so the wholesale value of a million credit card numbers has dropped significantly. So rather than finding new careers like my own favorite, opening a frozen custard stand, the guys who stole our numbers in the first place are starting to cut out the middle men and going after our stuff themselves. Given these are the really smart bad guys taking over from the not-so-smart bad guys, expect things to get bad, very bad, with billions — billions — in additional losses for financial institutions, retailers, and even some of us. These are the events that will finally lead — in 2016 — to real data security improvements.