*adjusts tinfoil hat*
Apr. 21st, 2006 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quidditchgrrlI'm a big conspiracy theorist, as some of you well know.
I quit doing point-of-sale PIN transactions about three years ago.
This is why.
Hackers and other nefarious types can obtain your card number, PIN, and in some cases, your bank account number during a point-of-sale transaction where you use your PIN. Wal-Mart and Office Max have both had their customers' numbers hacked and stolen.
Now banks are trying to pin those losses on the consumers, up to $500. Yeah, right. *stabs*
I wonder how much this third-party merchant paid to have their company name expunged from the notification letters? And how often it's happened in the past.
I've been reading No Place to Hide, and it's terrifying how easily identity information is obtained and used.
I thought it was funny, when I was getting my DoD paperwork done, that they interviewed me on several things that were a matter of public record, but practically nothing character/behavior. No interviews with family or friends.
Why quiz me on the obvious stuff and leave the "gray area" unchecked? Couldn't I have been an anti-government psycho with a youthful face?
Well, the gray area is very easy to get information on - it is now easy to track a person's purchasing habits, how much they owe on their credit cards, where they go after work...and the federal government has access to every scrap of that information. They also have access to the algorithms and programs that crunch that data and assess personality profiles and behavior patterns. It is scarily accurate, much more so than could be assessed in a face to face interview (because people can lie to other people, but what they like to eat and the places they like to go are habitual and reliable).
Scared yet?
The items that are on record are a little harder to work out, because they involve very specific paperwork and forms that do not have any gray area. Ticket given, fine charged, fine paid. There is no open database that lists the details of my rear-ending a Jeep, and you can't go poking around in police records that easily. Those one-off kinds of things don't predict a pattern of behavior nearly as well as tracking the dozens of purchasing transactions one makes each week.
They knew that I don't like coffee and I tend to eat organic fruit but not organic veggies, and I cherry-pick sale items at the grocery store. They were more uncertain about my speeding tickets and why my student loans were so high, so they had to ask personally.
So, funny. Funny in an ohmygodwerealldoomed kind of way. Big brother doesn't have to watch you; you're keeping track of yourself just fine. Click, click, click, and they've got you pegged.
Even if you are only marginally interested in how the government tracks people, at least pick this book up to read the chapter on how a program was used to generate a list of possible terrorists that could have been involved in the 9-11 attacks. That program picked more than a half-dozen of the actual hijackers on the first run-through, with the least specific data filter.
It's tough to reconcile, eh?
I quit doing point-of-sale PIN transactions about three years ago.
This is why.
Hackers and other nefarious types can obtain your card number, PIN, and in some cases, your bank account number during a point-of-sale transaction where you use your PIN. Wal-Mart and Office Max have both had their customers' numbers hacked and stolen.
Now banks are trying to pin those losses on the consumers, up to $500. Yeah, right. *stabs*
I wonder how much this third-party merchant paid to have their company name expunged from the notification letters? And how often it's happened in the past.
I've been reading No Place to Hide, and it's terrifying how easily identity information is obtained and used.
I thought it was funny, when I was getting my DoD paperwork done, that they interviewed me on several things that were a matter of public record, but practically nothing character/behavior. No interviews with family or friends.
Why quiz me on the obvious stuff and leave the "gray area" unchecked? Couldn't I have been an anti-government psycho with a youthful face?
Well, the gray area is very easy to get information on - it is now easy to track a person's purchasing habits, how much they owe on their credit cards, where they go after work...and the federal government has access to every scrap of that information. They also have access to the algorithms and programs that crunch that data and assess personality profiles and behavior patterns. It is scarily accurate, much more so than could be assessed in a face to face interview (because people can lie to other people, but what they like to eat and the places they like to go are habitual and reliable).
Scared yet?
The items that are on record are a little harder to work out, because they involve very specific paperwork and forms that do not have any gray area. Ticket given, fine charged, fine paid. There is no open database that lists the details of my rear-ending a Jeep, and you can't go poking around in police records that easily. Those one-off kinds of things don't predict a pattern of behavior nearly as well as tracking the dozens of purchasing transactions one makes each week.
They knew that I don't like coffee and I tend to eat organic fruit but not organic veggies, and I cherry-pick sale items at the grocery store. They were more uncertain about my speeding tickets and why my student loans were so high, so they had to ask personally.
So, funny. Funny in an ohmygodwerealldoomed kind of way. Big brother doesn't have to watch you; you're keeping track of yourself just fine. Click, click, click, and they've got you pegged.
Even if you are only marginally interested in how the government tracks people, at least pick this book up to read the chapter on how a program was used to generate a list of possible terrorists that could have been involved in the 9-11 attacks. That program picked more than a half-dozen of the actual hijackers on the first run-through, with the least specific data filter.
It's tough to reconcile, eh?
