Day: March 25, 2015

I do really like the iPhone / Yosemite personal hotspot tethering.

This stuff works remarkably well and most of the time, if I’ve got an LTE signal on the iPhone it’s faster than the Starbucks free internet.

It’s also private and less susceptible to “man in the middle” attacks and the like.

I’ve told my phone to only allow ONE connection at a time. So it’s either my iPad or my computer but not both.  Thus far I haven’t stumbled over that restriction making my life difficult.

Since the phone “knows” the iPad and the computer I don’t have to worry about my phone hotspot being hijacked by someone else either.

I expect that as this kind of thing becomes more prevalent we’ll see fewer and fewer public WiFi hotspots. 

As I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks whose WiFi is down.

I’m not missing it at all, my phone is doing the job happily.

If I wanted something more private, I could hardwire my phone to the computer. At that point, someone would have to  be monitoring the cell signal to grab my private data. That’s not to say it’s impossible, it’s just a little harder and requires equipment that’s not readily available at BestBuy.

I know I sound like a tinfoil hat wearing kind of guy with my privacy concerns; its always been of concern to me. We let so much data get out about us. 

Remember how back in the day Radio Shack wanted your Name, & Address when you bought something? Some of you may be way too young.

Back in the day, Radio Shack didn’t have cash registers. They had cash drawers and the employees had to be able to count back change. I know, I was one of those nerds working in a store asking for your name and address.

Oh we’d sell you stuff without you giving us that information. But we were required to ask, in fact we could be fired for not asking.

We would write all your items out by hand, then we’d add ‘em all up, look up the sales tax and total it. You’d hand us cash and we’d make change.

People used to get upset that we were asking for information that would put them on mailing lists, and it did!

Looking back on it I laugh.

Now days, we’re leaking private information all the time. Every web site where we create an account. Every news source that asks us to register so we can see the latest photo of a Kardashian, every phone call we make where we have to provide our social, phone number, security question answers, date of birth. etc is slowly bleeding information about almost every aspect of our lives from us.

What was your first pets name?

Mothers maiden name? 

Where did you live in 1988?

All the information is essentially handing the keys to our life to people we don’t know and whom we have no reason to trust. Each additional data point we give out “for our safety” serves to make us less safe.

I haven’t come up with any solutions in my life about it. I have become more mindful and resistant to creation of pointless online accounts. By default, any location information is denied pending my specifically telling a device to share that information. 

I think almost all websites ask your device for your location, again this is under the guise of trying to be helpful but does a newspaper really need to know where you’re reading it? 

This may well be a situation where the horse is out of the barn, the Djinn is out of the bottle, pandoras box is already open, I’m tilting at windmills,  or what have you.

In fact I’m sure it is, but I can’t help at least trying to maintain some marginal control over my data.