Wake up people, it’s time to get our heads and our data out of the Cloud. It’s not safe, it has never been safe, and it will never be safe. It’s time to take back control of our personal information. We have a ton of damage control to do and the companies that are asking for our data, are very bad as “gate keepers”.
Ask yourself, how much easier is it really, to take your phone out, find the purchase app, activate it, and wave your phone over a scanner to make a purchase? This as opposed to just pulling some cash from your wallet. And what has that “so-called” convenience cost us? Our personal information! Our security! Our privacy!
If you think for one minute that your data is safe, you have your head in a cloud and need to come back down to reality. You stand a better chance of wining the Lottery 10 times consecutively than you do of having your personal information secured in a Cloud server. Let’s face it, with the thousands of data breaches every year from multiple companies and even the U.S. Government, our private information is no longer private. It’s in the hands of others whom we do not even know.
If a stranger walked up to you today and asked for your name, address, phone number, email address, date of birth, the name of your favorite pet, your mothers maiden name, the street you grew up on, your social security number, and your credit card number; would you provide them all the info? You emphatically say no, but you do this every time you create a new account online and make purchases online. Worst of all, it’s not even a person asking you for this info, it’s a computer. A form on a website, and you convince yourself it’s safe. But it’s not!
Billions of bits of personal data is stolen every year and it’s only getting worse. Just looking back over the last ten years of data breaches, we have gone from millions of people’s info compromised per year, to billions per year.
3.5 billion people have had their personal data stolen just in 2019 and 2020 alone. That’s about half the population of the world.
Here’s a short list of some of the major breaches over the last few years along with the amount and type of info stollen, in no particular order.
Yahoo – 2013-2014 and again in 2016
Effected: 3 billion users
Items Stolen: email addresses, date of birth, telephone numbers, passwords, security questions and answers.
Equifax – 2017
Effected: 147.9 million users
Items Stolen: Social Security Numbers, date of birth, home address and in some cases, drivers’ license numbers.
eBay – 2014
Effected: 145 million users
Items Stolen: names, addresses, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords.
Adobe – 2013
Effected: 153 million users
Items Stolen: customer names, IDs, passwords as well as debit and credit card information.
Marriott – 2020
Effected: 5.2 million guests
Items Stolen: email addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, company names, gender, date of birth, and linked airline loyalty programs and numbers.
This list doesn’t even scratch the surface of the amount of breaches every year. So, the next time you try to purchase something online or with your phone and the company asks you for this type of information, you should ask them, how are you going to safe-guard my information? The truth is, they are not going to because they can’t. Not while they are storing your information on a sever in a cloud they built, or one that they are leasing from Google, Microsoft or someone else.
Wake up people, it’s time to take back our privacy and stop trusting companies that have a notorious track record of very poor record keeping. Putting it in perspective, if you had an employee that was releasing your information and that of their co-workers to world, would you keep that employee or fire them? I say it’s time to fire these companies that demand so much of our personal information with no concern about its safety.
Just my little rant.
Thank you for reading and comment if you like.
Pail Writer 