Category: Modern problems

Why is it that almost every single company you apply to for a job asks for you to create an account on their site?

Are we applying for jobs or are we providing information for data mining?

Well, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out, it’s both.

I detest having to create an “Account” just to apply for an advertised position, and I’m always concerned when a job application site asks me “Security Questions”

What’s your mother’s maiden name

Where were you born

What’s the name of your pet

What school did you attend

These bits of data, when aggregated with other bits gleaned from other sites can form a very complete picture of you as an individual.

Why do I need to create an account in the first place? The company I’m applying for hasn’t hired me, and in all likelihood we’re only going to have one time when we have contact with each other. The Odds of my returning to a particular corporate web site for anything other than prepping for an unlikely phone interview are exceedingly small. So why should I have to provide anything other than a resume and cover letter?

There are currently something like 300 accounts stored in my web account password manager, at least 250 of those are from sites that I don’t visit or have only visited one time. Yet each one of those entries represents a corporation that has some amount of my personal information. This is information that I shared in the hopes of getting a job and it’s information that is no longer under my control.

Knowing how data can be scraped and related, and how easy it is to include similar results from other people, I’ve become concerned not only about my loss of control of that data, but also the veracity of data presented as “Me” on sites like Mylife.com, Beenverified.com, spokeo.com, and peoplefinders.com. That doesn’t even touch what Google may report.

The issue for me is, due to the proliferation of these sites, it could be a full time job just asking them to remove me from their records and verifying that they’ve done so.

I don’t particularly have anything to hide, but I am concerned that these sites could inexpensively be used to create a very convincing false identity, leading to successful identity theft. I’ve been through that once and have no desire to repeat the experience.

As a minor example of how easily data can get screwed up, I once had an argument with a lady, (who may or may not have been a very distant relative) on Ancestry.com over whether my Father was in fact my father.

According to her research, my step siblings were my Father’s original family and my half brother (we share the same father) and I didn’t exist. She had pictures of my Dad in her ancestry page but the birth dates were all incorrect for all of my step siblings. I figured “Fine” live in your own fantasy world lady, but I was there and I know who my father and mother are.

The problem was, that every-time I corrected the data for MY immediate family in my account, her data would override mine. Matters were made worse when my stepfather and mother started adding information from their ancestry page and my mom discovered her marriage to my biological father and my subsequent birth were being erased by this lady that we didn’t even know. My mother tried reasoning with this woman and got nowhere. You do not want to piss my mother off, she will rent a bulldozer and get certified as a heavy equipment operator,  just to smash your car into a pancake.

I lost interest after a while because I was beating my head against a wall. I signed off of ancestry and haven’t been back. I purchased an application that runs locally on my computer. That way I can maintain the integrity of my personal family data without having someone arbitrarily make changes.

You see, this stranger was searching for context and her locating my branch of the family was easier than finding the real branch of the family that she was connected to. So instead of doing the research, she started creating or editing data that fit her narrative.

Imagine a scenario like this in more important matters. Your job history, your credit history, your criminal history…

How would you even go about correcting it? Unless you ran a background check on yourself periodically you might not even know that you had been cross-linked with someone else. The problem there is, the longer the cross link exists the more “True” it becomes.

I explain all of the above to support my implied assertion that we are being “Programmed” to give away random bits of ourselves without much thought. The consequence of which is that our identities and security is being eroded.

Do you really want your employer, your date, spouse, or your mother, to know about that rather large kinky sex toy you purchased on Dec 27 2005 at 3 PM in Los Angeles?  Or how about that time when you went to a shooting range with your boyfriend?

You may have purchased the toy as a practical joke, you may have gone to the shooting range to see what guns were all about and decided they weren’t for you, but the people looking at the sales records won’t know that, and you’ll never have the opportunity to explain because the folks looking at the data will never give you the chance.

We’re moving more and more toward a contextless world.

We see it in media coverage of political figures, Who cares if some politician dressed up in blackface AND a KKK outfit for Halloween in 1977, when they were 13 years old?

In a contextless society, that event reads as… Politician dressed in Blackface KKK robe. This insensitive leader must be removed from office immediately! It’s an outrage!

Not only do I not want to participate in that kind of society, I don’t want to hand a society the weapon to harm me.

So that’s why I’m very twitchy about websites demanding that I create an account for the simplest of things.

Call me paranoid if you wish, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.