Command Line Ninja

I just got a call from my bank… maybe. The caller asked for me by name, said he was from the bank, and wanted to talk to me about a personal banking matter. To continue he had to verify me by asking me questions, starting with my birth date. I asked him for his name, which was Matthew. Matthew who? Matthew “I can’t give you my last name”. Ah, well Matthew what department within HSBC do you work in, I will call the HSBC main number and ask for you by your name and number. He offers me a phone number to reach him at instead. I called the bank (certainly not on his number) but they are such lumbering unwieldy beast they don’t know if they have called me or not, but “you probably shouldn’t worry, we probably did call you and he just made a mistake in not giving you his full name”.

So am I paranoid or should I be cautious about giving out my personal information. Could Matthew be someone who has a receipt and wants to steal my identity, or is he just a cold call twat? Who is on the other end of the line, or the other end of the bitstream?

This issue of trust is bigger than just a customer service call though, I’m noticing it all the time. I’m trying to setup jabber so I can get my google mail chat to see friends on MSN or ICQ, but I have to use an open jabber server and give them my msn/icq/etc credentials. Do I trust this random server not to intercept my IMs or emails? What about review sites, do you trust anything anyone writes in them? I have a friend who astroturfed financial message boards for his job, or what about six04.net, those guys take huge pay-outs from those cafes that actually isn’t true, I trust them because I have a relationship with the individuals who run it, but is that the only way to trust a virtual entity, to know their fleshy creators?? That doesn’t scale well. I feel totally powerless in the face of such massive amounts of online information, almost all good, because I know some of it is patently untrue, placed there by marketers, scammers, and the like.

This digital alienation has slowly been building for me, especially now being far away from my closest friends, and relying on technology more for my communications with them. Perhaps technology will come to the rescue in the end? Digital signatures and chains of trust will go a long way to getting my confidence back. Social networking sites also seem like a great opportunity to build networks of trust.

Still I wonder how much of this alienation really comes from abuse of technologies, and how much comes from our culture. Do you know your neighbours? It’s all about me in my world… but I’m working on that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 1:46 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.