50+ Lifestyles

PUBLISHER’S CORNER

By Eloise Graham

Privacy in the Good Old Days

The other day I was paying for a service online. I was adding more minutes to my trakfone from my trakfone. Well, I got all of the information typed in; my name, phone number, my user ID, my password, amount of time I wanted added, the credit card information needed to pay the request, and a few other items of info that this “machine” thought it needed. All was going well until a screen popped up that said, “Enter your trakphone PIN number.” What??? I don’t know my PIN
number. I didn’t even know I had one. There was no way to try to retrieve said number. I guess I could understand needing my credit card PIN to access it, but this was the PIN for the phone that I was trying to give money to. At the least, I had wasted 1/2 an hour. Now I had to go to the brick and mortar store, waste more time just to purchase more minutes.

This got me thinking about all of the numbers and passwords we need to protect our accounts from others. We must learn or memorize or jot down in some secret place codes so that no one can retrieve our information, our emails or our phone calls. And yet, we hear more and more about security breaches, fraud, hackers and so on. We hear about how other countries and governments are “listening in” on our daily activities and conversations. How computers are programmed to know when we click on something so that advertisers will know what ads to have pop up on our screens.

The other day I hit on a site by accident. Harmless enough, it was for a lipstick color. Now I have cosmetic ads popping up all over my screens. Or clothing accessories to accompany that lipstick color.

Oh, how I yearn for the good old days of yore. Back to a time when life was simple… You remember that. No cell phone for some unknown out-in-space eavesdropper to listen in. Ah, to go back to the time when you just picked up the phone, got the operator [Let’s call her Gertie the Gossip] and asked her to connect you with a friend. Seems like the next day the whole town knew whom you had called and what you had talked about. But of course, you could trace the leak!

Hmmm… maybe things haven’t changed that much!