Personal Data & Tanning Goggles: We’ve Made Some Bad Choices

Getting your personal information hacked sucks. It’s a pain to deal with on every level. It causes more stress than the unnamed/unknown person felt on the set of Game of Thrones after they left the Starbucks coffee cup in a scene during episode four of this final season.

The first time my personal information was compromised was in 1994, when some doofus broke into the apartment mailboxes and opened credit cards in my name. I spent a lot of time on the phone with my bank and credit card companies trying to prove that it wasn’t me out in North Carolina buying gas, food and lotto tickets. In the time I spent on the phone with the bank and credit card companies, the said doofus had opened two more credit cards in my name. So the process was stuck in a loop for a long time. Eventually I had my employer call the companies with me on the line to verify that I was at work and in Columbus, Ohio during the dates of the disputed charges. That entire experience sucked.

During this particular time in the mid-90s, I still had a landline and my computer was simply a word processor. My cell phone consisted of one of the brick-sized mobile phones that were installed in our news cars. According to my news director at WTVN, those phones were only to be used during emergencies. We had to file our “live from the scene” radio reports using a pay phone. I do miss carrying around a roll of quarters and resting my coffee cup on the extra-large cell phone.

Ever since I first received an iPhone in 2009 (also from my employer), my personal information and/or personal data has been hacked, stolen, used or compromised 11 times. While those are only the times that I’m aware of, I’d guess that number is much higher.

The worst offense was after the Target payment data breach, when my information was replicated and some doofus (maybe the same doofus from earlier, who knows?) was flagged for using my information to buy pizza and groceries in Italy. My first reaction was, “Oh, I bet that was some damn fine pizza!” In all, he racked up about $4,500 in charges taken directly from my checking account over the period of four weeks. Ironing all of that out sucked.

I’m only one person and according to my math skills, there are more people than me living in this data world. Yep, I have confirmation, I just saw someone else outside. With those other than me people out there, we are living in some strange data security high-wire act of a life.

There are so many scary numbers of hacking victims, files and detailed personal information I could share with you, but those numbers will be outdated by the time I finish writing this column.

To me, the number that counts is 1 – you. According to a headline from thewire.com, “You Have Almost Certainly Been Hacked” and unfortunately, that seems to be a fair statement from the reporting done by our Roy Urrico and other technology reporters around the country.

The way I see it, we sold our digital souls intentionally or, most likely, unintentionally to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Samsung and so many others when we signed up for their services years ago. Do I want email ON my phone? Oh my god yes! And, wait, I can also use Facebook on my phone while I’m at my kid’s 8th grade band concert? SIGN ME UP!

The potential threat of actually spending time with ourselves alone and, god forbid, fully paying attention to things our kids are doing has paid off in spades with what we’ve done. We didn’t carefully read every “Terms of Use” statement. We blindly trusted the services we never had before to allow us to watch cat videos were worth the price of all of our information.

I think of it this way: It’s like we handed over our birth certificate, Social Security card, home address, checking account and credit card numbers, weight, height and shoe size to function in our digital world. Believe me, I was eagerly giving my information away too just so I could have the whole mobile and digital universe in my hands. And it was glorious!

As we’ve gone farther down this road, I feel dumb and have tried to reverse at least some of the digital damage that I wasn’t fully aware I was doing to myself in the early 2000s. Like going to a tanning booth in the 80s, we weren’t grasping the potential dangers. But, we sure looked awesome in those tanning goggles.

Sometimes we do need saving from ourselves. At the same time, those organizations that have publicly, and in many cases quietly collected our information need to be held to very high regulatory and ethical standards.

The time is long overdue to pass a strong and aggressive national data security standard. The European Union has done it with its General Data Protection Regulation. It’s not perfect, but on the flip side, the fines and penalties for technology organizations that break the GDPR rules are extremely high.

So far, our country has held a few public hearings in Congress to bark at Mark Zuckerberg and some Google executives. All bark. That’s it. This administration and others have relied too much on the campaign money from these enormously successful tech companies we have headquartered in our country. Tim Apple and other tech CEOs understand they have to take their tongue lashings from some politicians sometimes. After that, it’s back to campaign or PAC contributions to smooth things over while our data continues to be collected and many times “accidentally” used for the wrong reasons with no real ramifications for any bad doings.

It’s time for us and our credit union leaders to demand a national data security standard.

Recently, my brother was trying to find a childhood friend of ours, Jeff.

My brother texted me that he simply could not find any trace of him online. “He is unfindable online. Even his business info you can’t find. That has to be deliberate, you know?”

Jeff, if you’re out there reading this, keep living in the woods totally unplugged my friend. I envy you.

Michael Ogden is editor-in-chief for CU Times. He can be reached at mogden@cutimes.com.