A cybersecurity lecture
My high school ran a week where everyone was meant to do something to give back to the local community. Most people picked something hands-on. Given my background poking at security, the most useful thing I could offer was knowledge, so I put together a talk on staying safe online and gave it to students at a nearby high school.
Why this, of all things
A few years earlier I'd spent a lot of time teaching myself how networks and online systems actually work: the kind of self-taught security research I now frame carefully, because some of it was a teenager learning by prodding things he shouldn't have. The flip side of that curiosity is that I understood, concretely, how ordinary people leak data and get taken advantage of. A community-outreach week was a good excuse to turn that into something genuinely useful: helping younger students not get caught out.
What the talk covered
I built the deck (in Norwegian, "Datasikkerhet") around a simple arc: start from "what even is data," show how much of it you hand over without noticing, then make it practical.
- What data is, and how much it spans: location, financial, cultural, scientific, behavioural.
- Data you send: what leaves your device every time you browse, and what a server on the other end sees.
- Cookies: what they actually store, and why "accept all" is rarely in your interest.
- What data gets used for: advertising, profiling, and the difference between annoying and harmful.
- Other ways people get your data: social engineering, sketchy networks, and the human side of attacks.
- Local networks: why the coffee-shop Wi-Fi deserves more suspicion than people give it.
- Important data: what's actually worth protecting, and how.
- How not to be an easy target: a plain-language checklist for everyday habits.
What I took from it
The hard part wasn't the content. It was pitching it so a room of teenagers cared. Concrete examples ("here's exactly what this site knows about you right now") landed; abstract warnings didn't. It was the first time I'd had to translate technical knowledge into something useful for people without a technical background, which is most of what good engineering communication turns out to be.
The slides
The full presentation, in Norwegian: