Borrowed from Phil Madina's weather report of May 15, 2019, 9:54 AM
Being in the witness protection
program and a technophile I am fascinated and at the same time terrified of the
privacy issues of our tech. I’m fascinated at the promise of seamless
coordination of our digital lives.
Siri: what’s my next appointment?
-where’s the nearest pizza place?
I get in my car on Sunday morning
and my phone asks me: are you going to the bagel shop again? It will take 7
minutes.
Kind of useful stuff.
But then there’s the creep factor
where it oversteps its boundaries. Ads pop up in your phone for Dunkin Donuts
as you drive past it. Hair Club for Men send you emails a few days after you
“accidentally do a couple of searches for info on thinning hair”. Your phone
tracks your location constantly and logs where you stop. The companies promise
that they won’t use this data for evil purposes but…
Recently, I had a creepy tech
intrusion. I teacher I work with showed me a screenshot of an incoming
robo-call from our district. It said, “631 730-4900 Possibly Phil Medina”. I’ve
gotten those calls and thought little of it since I have that number listed in
my phone contacts as my work number. So I occasionally get calls from myself.
(definitely helps on days when I’m lonely and no one else calls). But now I had
a colleague that I’ve never exchanged phone numbers with, in any way, have my
name pop up in her phone with my work number.
Well, after some investigating it
appears that this was not an isolated incident and many people have gotten
robo-calls tagged with my name. It appears that these weather reports are the
culprit! I used to sign each report including my school and contact number here
(having now changed it to a number at school that will never call you). If you
read my emails on your phone, your phone noticed the number next to my name and
it made that connection.
Just for curiosity, if you have
gotten any fake calls from me I’d be interested to hear.
With each new innovation in tech, we need to be careful about how integrated our electronics are. As I said, being
in the witness protection program (hence the menial job and low profile that I
keep) I am particularly aware where my data goes. Facial recognition in
Facebook has caught cheaters in pictures with their paramours. Linked Microsoft
accounts between home computers and work computers have unexpectedly put home
photos on work desktops. I’m sure that GPS patterns have popped up messages
suggesting the best route and travel time to somewhere that someone should not
have been while someone else was looking at their phone. I recently read an
article about a woman who was checked onto a flight without showing her
boarding pass simply based on facial recognition, without her permission or
knowledge, with a camera at the desk that she didn’t notice. Her identity was
confirmed using a Homeland Security database that a private company (the
airline) had access to.
Thanks for sharing Phil!
