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What is the difference between safety and security in the context of information management or computer science?

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This could be the canonical answer for people searching for it. Let me know if superuser.com is the wrong site for this question.

I have, of course, googled it and haven't found an answer that seemed short and to the point. Wikipedia wasn't very helpful either: safety, information security.

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This sounds most suspiciously like a first-year university CS assignment question… (I don't mean to be rude if it's genuine.) – msanford Jun 27 '10 at 22:54
will it be answered ever in a exact answer?? – Ravisha Mar 11 '11 at 9:25
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Safety is generally thought of in terms of data integrity. Backups, checksums, etc all ensure that the data is safe from failure.

Security is protecting data from unauthorized access, such as private info being viewed by a trojan, or database tables being dropped from SQL injection.

Note that no one really really uses the word "safety" but the term "security" is widely used in the industry.

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Weirdly enough, both these words translate to one in Russian. So that was the reason I could not remember any real-world example of safety usage... – whitequark Jun 7 '10 at 2:24
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