Privacy and ID

Yesterday, my credit card company notified me that my account was one of many that was compromised. Luckily there were no fraudulent charges to dispute, but it still means that my identity was most likely stolen. Wonderful, I am now a member of the identity theft club.

It was almost like I was in denial yesterday (I guess because there wasn't any weird activity on my card)  as I explained the issue to Jarrod and a few others. "Well, my card was compromised, which means someone might have gotten access to my information." No Jamie, they did access your information.

You can file this under "Things about being an adult that no one ever really tells you about." I called my dad to ask what steps I needed to take next, and he let me know.

I would also like to note that dealing with my credit card company was not all that pleasant. I received a message from someone asking me to call them back about my card for suspicious activity with my card.  She was clearly foreign. I called back and spoke to someone also foreign and, in my opinion, clearly new. He was not good. There was a lot of dead air, he wasn't exactly all that sure of himself at times, and I almost began questioning if I was truly dealing with my credit card company, or an impostor saying they were my credit card but indeed they were part of the schtick to steal my info.

I called back again later one last time for another question and dealt with another foreigner, who was also clearly reading from a script. "Yes mam, I would hate to have this happen to my card too." Oh it was so fake. He also had a hard time understanding what I was asking, so I finally gave up. (We have another credit card that is much better, and whenever we call it has always been an English-speaking person.)

It's scary when you start thinking about just how easy it is for someone to access your information, millions of miles away. It's easy to go down that rabbit hole of thought, and it's hard not to get paranoid.

What is obviously making things all the much easier is all of the information we put out there online too. It always blows my mind when people don't lock down their Facebook accounts. Or the fact that FourSquare even exists. Or when people post vacation photos while they're on vacation. Clearly, you're just shouting to the world that you're not home right now, you won't be for a while, it's the perfect time to do something stupid.

Now you may be wondering "Jamie, but you have this blog. You're doing the same thing." Yes, in a way you are right but I have also made my blog very hard to find. It is not listed in the Blogger database and I have also set it so it is hidden to search engines. So my blog will never be indexed by Google. I never link to it publicly on Twitter. I very rarely post it onto my Facebook too, and even when I do, it's only visible to a certain list of people I've made who know me very well.