PRIVACY disappeared when credit cards were BORN
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I always have a laugh these days when I hear people being worried about privacy. Privacy disappeared when the credit card was born.
These days we worry about all the cameras around and how much data is shared online to everyone everywhere, but sadly, the worry is just too little too late. If you really wanted to avoid any privacy issues you should never have said yes to that credit card 40 years ago!
If you think that the journey of security today is complicated, imagine what it was like 40 years ago when all the banks got into the plastic cards. Never before had security of finances ever been an issue other than someone robbing a bank. Soon it became someone stealing your card and using it all to the max, and often without even taking that card from your pocket. It would have been an easy hacking maneouvre and before you knew it, all those 1,000,000 credit cards were somehow ‘charged an extra $2.00 fee’ that of course no one noticed or questioned, that meant that some hacker ended up with an additional $2,000,000 in their account. What the security analysts had to set up was constantly a headache and also the fact that it was dealing with people’s money made it even more stressful.
Today, as mentioned earlier, the stress of being filmed to me is minor. All I can say is that it is for my own good. If someone is robbed or killed it will all be there online. However of course, there shouldn’t be anyone filming you inside your own home, now that would be a total invasion of privacy, and still today that is a criminal offense.
It is the online security that people worry about. They are concerned that what they google will be thrown back in their face. That what they post on social media will be forever available to anyone and can be used against you. These things are true. But my question is, so why are young people today posting anything and everything online, when they know it will be there forever? I’m suspecting that they don’t really understand what 'forever,' means and assume that given another 5 years most stuff will be lost anyway. Not so sure that will happen or not. So for those who are not sure exactly what 'forever' means in reality - it means......fooooorrrr-evvvvvverrrrr! I hope that makes things clearer.
Or could it be that people really don’t care about people seeing their private life, that they believe that everything is public anyway now, so why worry. In same ways I can see their point but saying that when someone applies for a job, most employers will still google the person and check out who they are and what kind of character they are by what they posted. This does happen. So if you feel you can justify it all, that is up to you. Perhaps employers expect now some odd stuff online about everyone…not sure. But I still do think it is up to the individual to make sure their privacy is in their hands by making sure they are okay about what they post or google.
To this day, I do still think that the greatest privacy issue still sits in the hands of the credit cards. Why? Because, firstly the money is not yours to start with, you would owe it if you used it, and the fact that so much of what we do today is based on the convenience of paying by credit card. If someone decided not to have a credit card, they would certainly feel more financially secure, but their world would become so much more complicated, having to go always by hand to pay for things rather than online.
Ultimately I do think that privacy will always be an issue with technology around, but we have to weigh up the positives against the negatives and find some peace with that. The old saying that if you doing something you shouldn't be doing online, then don't do it, but actually though that is true to a certain extent, there are plenty of legal things that people do that are personal to them, and they do not feel comfortable letting other people e.g. employers, family, marketers etc know these things. Another side now too, is that nowadays you don't even have to post anything, and yet the internet of everything will still see where you are and what you are doing but your mobile phone locations and purchases. Plus who's hands is this information going to fall into?
We just can't avoid it, privacy is gone, and we just have to trust that those who are genuinely in control of all this will be doing the right thing. Truly a hard thing to swallow, but still it seems to me to be the only option. Thanks you credit cards!