Many of us, me included, grew up in the computer age. Newly advancing computer technology was beyond interesting to me and it became my passion as well as the basis for a 40 year professional career. Back in my early college days, we had just advanced past 80 byte punch cards to digital “deck writers” where your code was entered and printed out on a continuous stream of green and white lined, 132 character wide paper. If you liked your lines of code you could save it to tape storage on a Honeywell 68 DPS mainframe. Then you could call up your program from tape and run it and hope it all worked as designed. Interestingly, there was a secret command we were all warned “NOT” to ever enter on those deck writers because it would crash the entire mainframe and the storage currently held in memory. It was called, and I’m not kidding, “-destroy”. Yes. It was that easy to wreck the machine and everyone currently connected to it.
Then it was off to COBOL programming for a bank, where our division supported VISA credit card processing at a time when credit cards were just starting to explode across the US. Fraud exploded as well by simply making a phone call to provide your card numbers, or somebody else’s for that matter to make a purchase. There was no live local database available to track stolen numbers or cards. It often took days to manually track the card’s usage or to disable the card numbers against VISA’s central system. Theft was easy. Victims would often never know they were in trouble until a paper statement arrived in the mail a month later.
Silicon valley was my next stop where I worked for a pretty progressive and cutting edge business software company. Our products were based on desktop Microsoft application attached to either a UNIX platform or Microsoft server over a local network. We also quickly advanced to purely web based products, taking more advantage of server oriented software than locally resident code on the desktop. It was all pretty cool stuff and new and we found ways to secure the data passed across the wider internet, though for most companies with multiple offices the data was contained within a private leased network. The internet and Microsoft vulnerabilities were only just starting to get exposed as “hacking” became a fun and profitable business for some people of low moral fiber. Hacking became easier and personal data exposure grew with each new data mining company out there.
The cloud. Oh my God, the push by big tech companies to have businesses store all their information in the cloud, whatever that was. Most business executives didn’t care to know what the cloud was, only that it would be cheaper to store their historical and all their customer’s personal data there. Security for that data? Um. “Of course it’s completely secure… Here’s our complete access, encryption and storage protocols”, they would say.
“If there’s a line in, there is a way in.” – A former security expert / friend.
Two years ago while out of the country, our primary credit card was hacked, the personal data including authorizing phone number on our account was changed and someone charged $82,000 worth of performance auto parts on our card. When I disabled the card, the fraudster called in (confirming identity with all our personal data) to request a new card. He then charged even more on the new issued card numbers. It was then we learned that all our personal information was out on the dark web, hacked from a company called National Public Data, a company we had never heard of. Tell me again about that awesome security of cloud storage? It took 3 months of back and forth with the credit card company to reconcile the fraud versus what were our actual charges.
Ticketmaster, LinkedIn, Adobe, Target, Home Depot, Panera, Adidas, Advance Auto Parts, Michael’s Crafts, all sources of data breaches and those are only a few. It’s happening every day and not making the news. We even signed up for a security protection service after our dark web news and one of the services provided will locate our personal information and formally demand its removal from their “cloud” databases. Since signing up, this service located our personal information out on more than 25 data brokers. We were shocked to know how many companies were storing and using our personal data for their own profit, and stored without our knowledge or permission.
“It takes lots of money to allow the trampling of our 4th amendment rights” – me.
Cloud storage, AI, Flock cameras, Facial recognition, social media, text messages, email, photo history and other machine learning algorithms all exist to model you, your behavior, your movement, your search history, your preferences, and your weaknesses. This kind of stuff doesn’t exist or happen unless there is huge money backing the gathering of all this information. To what end? So you can see an ad pop up on your app or your phone about a 10% discount for footwear after you recently searched for loafers? No, it’s much worse than you think. The massive collection of all this data only happens if companies make huge money from modeling that data. Are you a conservative or a liberal? Are you gay or straight? Do you have money problems? Are you often depressed? Do you have lots of savings in your bank account? Are you a racist? Are you a pacifist? Do you support unions and blue collar workers? Do you hate women? Do you hate men? Are you afraid of a zombie apocalypse? Well then, we better sell you some doomsday freeze dried food for your underground bunker, we know how you vote and that you don’t believe in God.
All this is allowed because these powerful and wealthy companies and tech bros have paid for the privilege of stealing and profiting from your personal information. Courts and politicians have been convinced, by some really great and expensive lawyers, that all this personal data collection is good for business. Your privacy rights “don’t really exist if you are out in public”. And that’s the root of the issue. You don’t have privacy if you’re in your car on a public road, or walking through an airport or shopping mall, or surfing the public web, or buying a pair of shoes online, or inquiring about a potential medical condition, or spewing hateful comments on any public platform. It is all stored for further review by an AI bot, or some guy named “Adolfo” who’s managed to hack into that 26th data broker.
This was in my email box this morning, because why not. Another massive breach of data, with full drivers license information including your picture available on the dark web to the highest bidder. Oh sure, the FBI is now involved to hunt down those pesky hackers, but your data is permanently out there. Of course it was secured somehow by that high tech cloud data center so that your personal information was safe. LOL. ROTFLMAO. YMBFKM. (you must be f’ing kidding me).
Five years ago, I started to pull away from social media. Not for security reasons, but for privacy reasons. People tend to become the worst versions of themselves when they are not face to face with other humans. Some of the words were spiteful. Some of those personal beliefs made it to the forefront. Lines were drawn. Black or white. You either agree with me or you’re scum. You hate this or you hate that. I didn’t care to have all my personal beliefs out there, nor did I want to engage in a fight with people who were acquaintances or friends. I also knew it all would wind up as fodder data for somebody else to profit from.
I stopped carrying my phone everywhere I went. Not only because it can track location and the number of steps you take in a day, or key words from your texts or conversations, but because I don’t need to be constantly looking at the damn thing every 15 seconds. Hey, my life and my enjoyment of the here and now is more important that a Pavlovian response to a “ding” from my pocket. I’ll get back to you.
Are You Ready for the Hairs on the Back of Your Neck to Stand Up?
My wife and I were in my car with a Bluetooth connection to my iPhone previously set up. My Cell phone was powered on, but I was not using it. We had started a conversation about something we had seen while on the road and then I eventually shifted the conversation to something else, specifically the recent series of RUSH concerts across the US. When we arrived at a local restaurant, I decided to pull out my phone, open Chrome and do a Google search on the title of of an older RUSH album. I typed in 2 characters and the album name popped up to the top of my search list. The phone was listening to everything we said. There is no way that a random search on 2 characters would produce the exact result I was looking for when there was no history, and I mean NO previous reference to the band RUSH in any search history or conversation. It was scary. Really scary.
I still have a YouTube Channel and a website because I like to do that woodworking thing, but I’m not selling anything or buying anything, or hawking product from a Chinese company. I like to share tips and tricks from the wood shop, but that’s it. You might spot that my dog’s name is Dash from one of my videos but no, Dash is not a word associated with any password on any system, anywhere.
After all these years immersed into a technology career, or suffering through multiple data breaches or the systematic loss of privacy and personal freedom, I’m done with new high tech. I remember being an advocate for technology, but only when there was an ethical business case for its adoption. I’d fight with non technical executives as they got excited about some new technical advancement. “We should be doing this”, or “We should be buying that” were the words they used when it was only about the glamour of the new bright shiny thing. “And what would you like me to do with that thing? How do you see it benefiting the company?” I’d ask. Silence followed.
I still like my iPhone but sometimes it remains in the kitchen if I go out on a short errand or a canoe ride. I love my laptop and my video editing software because it allows me… ME to be creative, rather than having AI generate the video for me. I use my tablet to play word games or read before I doze off to sleep. But I am not down with opening up more of my life to technology so that somebody else can profit. AI? Some of it’s use seems helpful like in the medical field for disease diagnosis, or historical research, or making an engine design more efficient, or evaluating trends and models for weather patterns. It is however, not the be all end all solution to artistic expression or every other “productivity” issue out there. I’m sick of the spotlight being focused on each new technical advancement for the sake of the “new”. It’s a stock market play. Get people excited! Forget about risks and practical uses, just buy some of that stock! The loss of privacy? At some point when a high enough ranking Senator’s daughter gets exposed by all this personal data capture, we might start to see some legislative changes.
From now on, if you’re going to try and ram a bright shiny new piece of technology down my throat and tell me it’s the most wonderful thing since the serrated knife to slice bread, you need to show me the value of what you intend to use it for. Finally, we need to get that multi-billion dollar influential tech money out of politics and the courts. You’d be amazed at how much of your personal privacy isn’t private, especially when it’s those same big tech companies owning and trafficking your data. It’s a great opportunity for them, while you may not even be aware of what is happening in the background.
