Where do I fit?
Five years ago I
would definitely fit in the paranoid crowd. My phone is on the “do not call
list” and I have a phony birth date for the Internet. I still do not have my
profile “finished” on Facebook. I mean anyone who really knows me, knows where
I live and my birthday. If you don’t ... well ask me offline ... maybe I’ll
tell you where I live ... if I trust you.
Just because you’re
paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you (similar to Heller’s
quote mentioned in the article) is an adage I’ve found useful in my life. It
manifests itself in things such as using prepaid cards for Internet purchases
and having a special email address to give sites that insist on an email
address for whatever it is I wish to do on the site.
I have over the
last couple of years, very reluctantly, surrendered elements of my privacy to
social media ... it is the only way I can keep tabs on my grandchildren
(several of whom live with my son’(s) exes, who have cut off the ex’s family,
so FB is the only contact I have with them) and nieces and my younger children
and their friends. I think somewhere I learned I have a parental responsibility
to keep up to date with what my younger kids have been up to. It is very
enlightening to peruse their Facebook pages.
So now because of
pseudo-necessity, I am riding the middle line, but still closer to the paranoid
side of the road than the put it all out there, “nothing to hide” side. I
haven’t forgotten the FBI report that 75,000 Americans get their identity
stolen every year. I still won’t trust online banking not because I doubt their
encryption but because my terminal is not part of their system and is therefore
vulnerable.
I suppose I am
slowly accepting the fact that some machine somewhere is keeping better track
of me than I keep track of myself; just because there are too many things I
need to do that I can’t do without that surrender of my privacy, but I really
really don’t like it.
My biggest lament
on this matter I suppose is that after all the fighting we did in the 60’s thru
80’s for privacy rights, there is now a whole generation of young people who
surrender their privacy as if it weren’t worth the paper a copy of the
constitution is written on. I fear that George Orwell had it all right, except
the year.
I am still short about 4 Facebook likes. Please if you have not already liked my page, The Facebook url = https://www.facebook.com/VietnamWarMyths, please do so. The website http://www.VietnamWarMyths.org is close enough that I loaded this weekend, even though several pages are still under construction. I wrote the code for the page myself so some of the style weaknesses that you may note are because my knowledge of web code is limited. For instance I don’t know java script & my php is weak, so I haven’t used them at this point for this page.
Let me know what you think, please. Also if you could advise me of any glitches you find, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks
