Personal information security as a social problem

Informatization of society has led to a set of fundamentally new problems that humanity has not faced throughout the history of its development. These are the challenges of ensuring the information security of man, society, the state and the entire biosphere of our planet. The article considers the key information security issues of the contemporary world. The authors focus on the nature and essence of information, analyze the concept of information security in a wider and narrower interpretations. They argue that the practices of applying information technologies without ensuring the necessary information security significantly increase the likelihood of information threats, primarily the information inequality, the possibility of manipulations, cyber illnesses, computer crimes, information warfare, etc. Artificial intelligence is one of the key elements of the information age, which is already able to analyze, process and classify huge volumes of rapidly changing and extremely heterogeneous data; thus, the widespread use of artificial intelligence technologies becomes an essential factor in ensuring information security. Artificial intelligence can facilitate the free exchange of information, but it can also be used to spread disinformation and fake news. At the same time, the content moderation for information hygiene purposes can be based on the artificial intelligence algorithms. Thus, artificial intelligence technologies can and should serve as a means of ensuring personal information security. This means that security measures must be comprehensive and include not only instrumental and technological but also ideological and cultural measures - educational in nature, providing the appropriate orientation of the individual.