16 Dec 2016

And Then Another Hack...

Seems it’s Yahoo – again - wot’s ‘lost’ all their customers information. Happily, I bailed out of Yahoo quite some time ago. Yahoo!!!

Why did I bail out? Well, way back in the day when the number of people using the Interweb could probably be counted in the low thousands, and as all those sign-up sort of sites and services started coming along, we all just signed-up willy-nilly with scant to no concerns as to security and to the protection of the requested personal information.

Any-yahoo, as the Web became ever more popular and naughty people started to see ever more possibilities to be very naughty, I decided to delete as much of my on-line personal information as possible. Did that help? Probably not but it did make me feel a tad better by being marginally less exposed to bad boys. Back then, I sure didn’t consider Billy as a bad boy.

Here’s the kicker for any out there contemplating a similar move. All those ‘fun’ sounding places out there? Unless things have dramatically changed, you can sign-up to any of ‘em in a heartbeat but will they let you go? Man, what a nut-crusher that can be. As I said, things may have changed but I do remember Facebook was a marathon with the final hurdle letting me know they’d keep my details for two{?} years because they just knew I’d want to come back.

LinkedIn was a similar roundabout of them being convinced I didn’t really want to go so, just in case, we’ll hang on to your details...

The classic example was something I signed up to hundreds of years ago for retrieving news groups and feeds. I hadn’t used it for a long, long time owing to advances in RSS feeds an’ such so finally shook ‘em off and they assured me my personal details ‘...will be deleted from our servers in five years time from the date of this notification.’

So when you choose to ‘delete’ an account with anyone, you instantly lose the ability to log on to that ‘service’ but are your details really deleted or do they still have a ghostly presence ‘out there’?

Remember all those text messaging services you signed up to twenty years ago just to find the best? Remember going back through the unused ones and deleting your account and personal details? What? You don’t remember doing that? Most of those services just died away anyway so all personal details will have died as well, right? Right?

I’m guessing the old ‘get me out o’ here’ game has simplified and become more comprehensive by now. Right again?

Quote;  Stieg Larson.

“We need to have a talk on the subject of what's yours and what's mine.”

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