This is no conspiracy...

After reading a response to my last post, and having a laugh at my father last night, I decided that it's time to bust a bubble that has been looming Online for quite some time.

A reader sent me a message of concern regarding my disregard for personal safety by posting links to all of my social media accounts. "You're seriously willing to submit your personal life to complete strangers?"

Then, while creating an online account to pay off a student loan (long story within itself) I was choosing a security question. "Mother's place of birth" seemed like a good one, since I didn't even know that. So I asked my dad what the answer was and he was reluctant to give me the answer.

"What's it for?" he said with a sincere tone of concern.

"Nothing, just a security question."

"I'm not comfortable giving out that information. Once they know where you live they can get your social security number and then they can steal your identity."

...I know what you're thinking.

Yes, this is possible. Of course this happens all the time.

BUT

What I want to point out is the amount of information about you that you think is personal but is really quite public.

Imagine all the things that we do online these days: online banking, online bill pay, online taxes, e-mails, document sharing, instant messaging, Googling... all of these things are logged into a database. These databases are manipulated to provide companies with information about selected groups of people. (I actually have a friend that works in this field and is able to create algorithms that can predict crazy things, like how many times a person will eat fast food in a week.)

So, should you really be concerned about linking your social media profiles and making the birthplace of your mother an answer for a security question?

It's up to you. How deeply do you want to involve yourself in a system that knows everything about you?

I would just rather go along with my life and hope that my profile doesn't stand out amongst a database to be targeted by some information science terrorist that is out to steal all $242 in my bank account.

But then again, exposing this terrorist's plot to destroy the world one person at a time makes me a target...

Nice knowing all of you.

n/a