BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT: VAMPIRES OF YOUR IDENTITY…A GLOBAL VIEW

If we all had the ability to stand back and look at the comprehensive state of the identity crisis, what we would observe would be a condition in this country whereby private business and government are sucking the personal data out of our lives. Dramatic? Yes, for effect. It would be impossible for me to count the times each day your private information is uprooted from a number of computers somewhere here in this country and overseas, and either moved to another location or massaged for data mining. Based on my experience as a junk mail data broker, it numbers in the hundreds or thousands. It may not be your name they’re after, but you are housed in a database with millions of other names, along with their sensitive data, and to reach John Smith they have to bump up against you and me and several million others. You say, so what? Well, the answer is that each time the bump occurs, there’s the chance your personal data could be lost or stolen. And with the recent incompetence we have witnessed in both business and government’s handling of our private information, there’s plenty of reason to worry. Most of us have enough to deal with living our every day lives, but your identity is your life and it is being threatened on a daily basis. Individual control is the answer, but it won’t happen unless you want it to.