Gone phishing

How gullible are you? Here’s how you find out: take the last four numbers of your Social Security card, add them to the year you were born and that’s the percentage of how gullible you are.

Want to know the rapper name for someone as gullible as you? Take your first dog’s name and the last thing you ate and you’ll have it.

If you think those fun and funny questions that keep popping up in memes on right-wing propaganda highways like Facebook are nothing more than a humorous diversion, then the laugh’s on you.

They’re actually sophisticated, well-designed, algorithmically enhanced, individually targeted ways to fool you into ponying up passwords, security question answers, user names and other personal information that in any other circumstance you’d never reveal to anyone.

The term is phishing. And while phishing originally applied to emails that tried to get you to reveal your personal information to people like that Nigerian prince who needed your bank account to deposit the lottery winnings/inheritance he had waiting for you, the term now applies to any online scheme to rube you out of your personal info.

Full disclosure—I’ve answered a few of these my own self, but only after careful consideration as to the possibility of discerning any of my info from my answers. Of course, I won't know if I got it right until it's too late.

The other part of it is advertising. You and your eyes are the only product Facebook has to sell to advertisers. By posing seemingly harmless, mildly entertaining questions and getting you to answer them, Facebook algorithms easily divvy up a dossier of your likes and dislikes, political views, salary, occupation and more into demographic buckets to justify their ad rates to agencies and advertisers.

Not to burst anyone’s fun bubble, but I’m old enough to remember when privacy was a thing. It still is with me. And if you want to protect yourself from fraud, identity theft, a barrage of advertisements and unscrupulous social network creators, it should still be a thing with you too.

My recommendation is find your fun elsewhere, in ways that won’t separate you from your money without you knowing.

And if anyone asks why you won’t answer these fun questions, tell them rapper Ace Shrimp Burrito told you not to.

In the bag

Whether we like it or not, everyone in the ad biz deals with demographics – the quantifiable statistics of a certain group - every day.

Age, household income, habits, geographical location, political leanings, purchasing habits, consideration cycles, tv shows watched. Every thing you do and everything you are is broken down so advertisers can talk to you in a way you'll allegedly want to listen to.

It’s frightening how much information is available on any given group of people at any given moment.

What a lot of people in different demos have in common is they all take a great amount of pride in classifying themselves as non-conformists. Unique in their category. Of course, were that true, we wouldn’t be able to lump them in the same category.

One group in particular, and I have some first-hand experience with this, likes to think of themselves as rugged individualists, blazing their own trail, living life on their terms - loners not playing by anyone’s rules but their own.

Copywriters.

And while they may be marching to their own drum in other areas of life, many fall right in step with each other when it comes to a common accessory: their laptop bag.

The bag of choice? The Swiss Army backpack.

I can only speak for myself here, but the reason I love this bag is all the storage options. Zippers and pockets and nets, oh my. For someone like me, who uses the "just in case" theory whenever I pack - which is the reason I look like I'm moving in when I go on an overnight business trip - the Swiss Army backpack lets me carry every thing I need for almost any imaginary contingency I run into.

For example, I've had a deck of Bicycle playing cards in one of the netted side pockets for years. It's a holdover from when my good friend, sometimes art director partner and co-conspirator Mike Stone and I took magic classes at the Magic Castle (the first thing we learned was how to make $265 disappear). You never know, I might've been walking down the street or in a client meeting and had the sudden and unstoppable urge to show someone Stopped Aces, or The Matchmaker.

Pick a card, any card.

One of the zippered compartments has a varied assortment of computer connection cords that may be from my Powerbook 3400. Or my Macintosh Performa 6210. Maybe my Powerbook G4. I'm not sure - I've never used them.

Yet another compartment is my portable medicine chest: Aspirin. Ocean Nasal Spray. Coricidin. Pepto Bismal. Each and every one of them years past their expiration date. But at least they've been stored in a cool, dry place.

In the netted pocket on the other side is a bottle of water that should only be used to water plants. If you want to kill the plants.

And in the vast, canyon-like laptop compartment, which is what I initially bought the backpack for, is nothing. I long ago traded carrying the backpack around for a smaller, lighter Incase laptop bag. It doesn't let me carry nearly as much, but that's probably a good thing.

I guess just owning the Swiss Army bag puts me in the demo with all the other copywriters that have one. And I know what you're thinking: Just like every other writer, he's probably going to end this post with some snappy, clever line that has several meanings and works on so many levels.

But, being the non-conformist I am, I won't.