I detest having to create an \u201cAccount\u201d just to apply for an advertised position, and I\u2019m always concerned when a job application site asks me \u201cSecurity Questions\u201d<\/p>\n
These bits of data, when aggregated with other bits gleaned from other sites can form a very complete picture of you as an individual.<\/p>\n
Why do I need to create an account in the first place? The company I\u2019m applying for hasn\u2019t hired me, and in all likelihood we\u2019re 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?<\/p>\n
![\"bigstock-210973132.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/bigstock-210973132.jpg\" "\\"bigstock-210973132.jpg\\"")
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\u2019t 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\u2019s information that is no longer under my control.<\/p>\n
Knowing how data can be scraped and related, and how easy it is to include similar results from other people, I\u2019ve become concerned not only about my loss of control of that data, but also the veracity of data presented as \u201cMe\u201d on sites like Mylife.com, Beenverified.com, spokeo.com, and peoplefinders.com. That doesn\u2019t even touch what Google may report.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ve done so.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t 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\u2019ve been through that once and have no desire to repeat the experience.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
According to her research, my step siblings were my Father\u2019s original family and my half brother (we share the same father) and I didn\u2019t 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 \u201cFine\u201d live in your own fantasy world lady, but I was there and I know who my father and mother are.<\/p>\n
The problem was, that every-time I corrected the data for\u00a0MY<\/strong> 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\u2019t 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, \u00a0just to smash your car into a pancake.<\/p>\nI lost interest after a while because I was beating my head against a wall. I signed off of ancestry and haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Imagine a scenario like this in more important matters. Your job history, your credit history, your criminal history…<\/p>\n
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 \u201cTrue<\/strong>\u201d it becomes.<\/p>\nI explain all of the above to support my implied assertion that we are being \u201cProgrammed\u201d to give away random bits of ourselves without much thought. The consequence of which is that our identities and security is being eroded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
![\"SocialNetwork.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/SocialNetwork.jpg\" "\\"SocialNetwork.jpg\\"")
Do you really want your employer, your date, spouse, or your mother, to know about that rather large<\/strong><\/em> kinky sex toy you purchased on Dec 27 2005 at 3 PM in Los Angeles? \u00a0Or how about that time when you went to a shooting range with your boyfriend?<\/p>\nYou 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\u2019t for you, but the people looking at the sales records won\u2019t know that, and you\u2019ll never have the opportunity to explain because the folks looking at the data will never give you the chance.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re moving more and more toward a contextless world.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
In a contextless society, that event reads as\u2026 Politician dressed in Blackface KKK robe. This insensitive leader must be removed from office immediately! It\u2019s an outrage!<\/p>\n
Not only do I not want to participate in that kind of society, I don\u2019t want to hand a society the weapon to harm me.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s why I\u2019m very twitchy about websites demanding that I create an account for the simplest of things.<\/p>\n
Call me paranoid if you wish, but that doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019t be surprised to find out, it\u2019s both. I detest having to create an \u201cAccount\u201d just … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “In a time when privacy is of such concern…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,9,19],"tags":[174],"class_list":["post-9100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-technology","category-things-that-make-you-say-hum","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9100"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9102,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9100\/revisions\/9102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"thisisyourbrainontheinternet.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/bone-in-the-throat.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/thisisyourbrainontheinternet.jpg\" "\\"thisisyourbrainontheinternet.jpg\\"")
Why is it that almost every single company you apply to for a job asks for you to create an account on their site?<\/p>\n