Don't Let Technology Crack Your Nest Egg by Ken Kamen

Author:Ken Kamen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SelectBooks
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Privacy Is Dead, and Social Media Holds the Smoking Gun”

The quote is from Pete Cashmore, the CEO and founder of the digital media website Mashable.

Anyone with a social media account is likely to have posted what amounts to a bonanza of identifying material: names, email addresses, and locations; employment history; names of family members, friends, and pets; birthday and anniversary dates; and other clues that help motivated people crack passwords or answer security questions.

The point was made in dramatic fashion in a television ad from Febelfkin, the nonprofit Belgian Financial Sector Federation. A series of passersby (real people, not actors) are randomly invited into a tent to have a session with a psychic, and each in turn is stunned as the psychic comes up with incredibly specific insights: He describes the color of one man’s motorcycle, reels off the exact amount another woman spent on clothing the previous month, and even reveals that a third person participated in a sexual foursome. “Hardly anyone knew!” she gasps.

At the end of the sessions, a curtain is dramatically pulled back, revealing a small group of researchers in a corner of the tent. Facing a bank of computers as the psychic subtly pried clues out of the subjects, they had quickly gathered more details about the subjects online and transmitted them into the psychic’s hidden earpiece. You quickly realize that the subject themselves had publicly revealed all the information that the psychic “intuited.”

We say we are concerned about protecting our privacy. A 2015 Pew Research study found that 74% of respondents said it is very important to them to be in control of who can get information, 61% said they would like to do more to protect their privacy, and a large majority said the privacy laws should be tightened and advertising should be regulated.

But there’s a paradox at work. Though the Belgian commercial is just one example of how much data can be harvested from social media postings, not everyone is willing to stay away.

While 59% of users thought giving up social media would not be hard (of whom 29% percent said it wouldn’t be hard at all), 40% held the opposite point of view (with 14% saying it would be very hard.) As you might expect, older people were less engaged with social media. Among people 50 and older, 66% would find it easy to give up vs. 33% who would find it hard. For people aged 18 to 24, the respective numbers were 49% vs. 50%. 98 In fact, being tracked, rather than being seen as a problem, may actually confer a sense of “specialness” to the younger demographic, as three studies of Harvard students suggest:

When offered a discount coupon to a restaurant online, students were more likely to buy it if they thought they were targeted for the offer based on the travel sites they had previously visited rather than randomly or on the basis of age and gender.

Shown an ad for an expensive watch, some subjects were told the

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