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.

A deliberate cover up

I've never been particularly paranoid. But I will cop to the fact I have a little OCD about certain things.

For example, I check the door several times when I leave the house to make sure it's locked. Then I start to walk to the car, forget whether I locked the door or not, and come back and check it again.

I also check the oven at least two or three times to make sure there's no gas flame on the burners.

Admittedly, I unplug the chargers around the house before I go, not to save on the electric bills but, like the oven, to make sure there's not a short and the house doesn't burn down.

Call it what you will. I prefer to think of it as being thorough.

The other place I always happily err on the side of caution is when it comes to guarding my personal information. At least as much as I can in the age of the interwebs.

When I sort through my mail, I have two piles. One goes in the trash as is, and the other - almost always the larger pile - goes in my heavy-duty, industrial strength, cross-cut, fifteen-page-at-a-time feed shredder.

Next to my kids laughing, hearing credit card applications, bank statements and old tax receipts being shredded is the sweetest sound.

My friend, and occasional art director partner Mike Kelly likes to make fun of me for taking precautions the way I do. When we work together, he loves to chide me with the fact he does all his financial business - banking, taxes, loans - online. He knows it makes me crazy. I always tell him he's an identity theft waiting to happen. But he's never worried about it, and it's never happened to him.

It's happened to me twice. Maybe he has the right idea.

Anyway, my family certainly knows this aspect of my personality, which is why when it came to giving me the perfect gift, they gave me one they had no doubt I'd love.

What this little baby does is pictured above. Basically, it's a home redacting system. Simply run it over the document you want to render unreadable, and then it is. Despite it's diminutive size, it packs a powerful punch when it comes to my sense of security. Okay, maybe I have issues. What's it to you?

Anyway, it's my kind of gift and I couldn't be happier about it.

And let's face it: I can't carry the shredder everywhere.