Anonymity

Our debit card recently expired and we were issued a new one. Then, of course, we had to notify and update the various places our information is stored. Netflix, my website provider, places we regularly shop online, the online pharmacy...our banking info is in an appalling number of locations.

All my e-mail providers want my mobile phone number. I'm behind the times enough that I don't have one. Oooops. They don't know how to cope with that.

When I opened a PayPal account it was a big problem because they wanted copies of snail mail bills, etc. for identity proof. Except...our bills arrive via e-mail. Ditto the bank statements. Ditto everything.

I just wonder. What happens when everything crashes?

We had a small taste of that when our debit cards expired. Can't pay for anything. Can't get money from the ATM. In a plastic world, what happens when the plastic world shuts down?

We keep small amounts of cash on hand--enough to buy milk or bread if necessary. Certainly, we don't have enough to pay for medicine or gas or an 'emergency'.

In our 'modern' world, we rely on technology to an astonishing extent. Much of that technology leads directly back to the Internet. Our private information is shared on a daily basis--financial, medical, identity--as casually as we change clothes.

I recently finished re-reading Nora Robert's 'in Death' series. Part of the background premise for that series is the enormous amount of personal information available to the 'authorities'. Marriages, births, divorces, educational history, arrest history, finances... Back when I read the first book (when it was first published) all that was fantasy.

Think about that.

When she wrote that first book, the idea that our personal information would be so easily available was fantasy. It was off in some nebulous future.

The future is now. There is no anonymity. There is no privacy.