I have a popular security product on my 'puter -- well okay, it's Norton utilities -- and it seems to do the job. However, they are constantly trying to upsell me, to the point where it's seriously annoying. Their latest ploy is to repeatedly show me pop-ups telling me that they've found data brokers selling my information on the (doom chords on the organ) Dark Web. They are kind enough to reveal for me what the information actually is. My name, email address, employer, address, and phone number. Also who my relatives are. Oh no, I'm dooooooooomed.
It turns out that the phone numbers are landlines I had when I lived in Boston more than 15 years ago; and my childhood home where I haven't lived for 50 years, which my mother sold ten years ago. The relatives are my dead parents, a guy who lives across the street to whom I am unrelated, and three people I never heard of. However . . .
My email address and work phone number are posted for all to see on my faculty page, and our departmental web page. The email is listed on some 20 or 30 papers for which I am corresponding author, most of which are now in the public domain. (NIH funded research gets out from behind the paywall within two years.) Regardless, I'm old enough to remember when the phone company (there was only one) delivered a book to every household in the United States, every year, containing the name, address and phone number of every household and business in town that didn't proactively choose to be omitted, which almost no-one did. You could also call 411 and ask for that information for anybody whose name and municipality you happened to know, anywhere in the United States and its territories.
This was a good thing! It meant that you could communicate with people in your community, contact old friends whose phone number or address you had lost, or who you learned one way or another had moved to Kalamazoo and wanted to get in touch. Now apparently you need to get this information from Data Brokers, and it's apparently a bad thing that you can do it. I got a frantic email from our IT department telling all the faculty that there had been a data breach and somebody had harvested all of our physical addresses, email addresses and phone numbers. Horrors! Now people won't have to look it up on the public web pages that we actively promote.
I don't know what the heck is going on here, but if you want to communicate with me the link to my faculty page is in the side bar. You can skip the Data Brokers.
1 comment:
As a sidenote, I recently went into the control panel of my computer and disabled specific pop-ups, especially from McAfee, which does the same thing to the point where it's exasperating. Apparently, 15 pop-ups in a row isn't enough for them! Even worse, they lie about my computer being infected when I don't even subscribe to their service. One more thing, along with hate speech, slander and libel, that should be illegal :-)
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