Privacy

I don't think about privacy much.  I am somewhat cautious, and encourage my children to be so, on the web, about handing out personal information right and left, but I'm neither paranoid about it nor cavalier.  I shop on line, figuring that the dangers of handing out my credit card that way are at least as good as handing them out to the gas station attendant on a nearby "highway" who stole my credit card number a few years back.  And there's always the odds of getting mugged in Manhattan to think about and having my identity stolen that way.  I have had plenty of chances, after moving from a job in a "troubled" neighborhood to a "country club" neighborhood, of discovering that disloyalty and bad behavior and violations of privacy and betrayal are the purview of the wealthy moreso than the underprivileged.  No self-respecting drug dealer or gang member would violate individual privacy or even tattle.

But there is a new twist I discovered on the privacy issue last evening hanging out with Clark Kent.  I don't know if I've revealed this before about her, but she's a bit of a technology nerd.  Okay, maybe that's an understatement.  She's a colossal technology nerd.  She's the kind of person everyone I know goes to for help with their gear--laptops, iPods, phones, DVD players--whatever you've got, she's the most likely person in our circle to be able to make it work.  And she showed me a new privacy violation that has happened to her.  Not to her, but at her.  Her privacy is safe as long as I keep referring to her "Clark Kent" and not by her real name on this blog anyhow.

Last night she showed me the daily emails she is currently getting from . . . well, I don't want to disparage the inner-workings of an online giant like this one, but let's just say, a dating site.  And let's just also say that it's not a specialty site that focuses on a specific ethnic group or anything.  It's a monster huge gigantic site for everyone looking for a date.

Only here's the kicker: Clark didn't join the site.  Somebody else did and accidentally entered Clark's email address instead of their own.  And her (we think) daily reports from the matchmaking site are coming to Clark as to who might be perfectly suited for her dating hopes and dreams.  Which might be really fabulous if not for the fact that said matches are for the individual who put in the wrong email, who, as it happens, we can speculate, has little in common with Clark.

Clark Kent is my daughter, who graduated from an eastern college of note five years ago this month.  And although the graduation itself does not preclude her from being of a certain age, the odds are good that she is yet in her twenties.  And I will vouch for that being the case.  It's already hard enough for me to admit that I have a daughter who graduated from an eastern college of note five years ago this month, in that that makes me at least reasonably older than minimally 27 years by 20 some further years, given that I got married and had her after college my own self . . . but to suggest that the perfect "match" for her according to her daily emails, might be a gentleman in his seventies or eighties, is an insult to my slim grasp on middle age cause if she's that age, I'm 100 and change.  Which I'm not.

But the disturbing bit goes like this: her emails show little photos of gentlemen who belong to this site who are longing to find the perfect mate.  And a quick click on any of said photos will take you to a fairly detailed profile of said individual--location, age, career (or career from which he has retired), preferences about all sorts of very private and personal things.  It's beyond creepy.  Especially the shirtless ones.  But I digress.

What has happened here is that some dozens of elderly gentlemen in the midwestern portion of the US have unwittingly sent their fondest hopes, dreams, and best-foot-forward portraits, to a hip young techno geek who resides in New York City.  And she can't stop it, even though she might want to, because the mistaken email password on the dating site is unknown to her.

What are we supposed to do about this privacy issue, huh?