Big Brother is Watching.
Or at least, in the 70’s, we thought so. The illusion that the government had eyes and ears everywhere was at the forefront of our minds. Somehow, we believed, Big Brother (i.e. anyone in “authority,” such as government, law enforcement, etc.) would use a twig to rat out the tree. We never wanted to say very much, as anything we said could be twisted and used against us. The paranoia of the McCarthyism mindset stayed with us.
We now live in an information age, where all knowledge is only a few keystrokes away. What a distance we have traveled in forty years. Without blinking an eye, we have started giving away our personal information to hundreds of “trusted friends” on social networks like MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.
After all, anyone that might read it only has our best interest in mind, right?
Without realizing, the personal information we randomly choose as our security questions is the same information readily available on Facebook, or any of the other deep wells of personal information to cull from.
Our lives are driven by remembering passwords to the thousands of “secure” websites and software programs we use daily. In the likely chance we don’t remember, we then must remember the answers to our security questions to gain access; but, how secure are those questions, really?
Not to step back in the Big Brother era, but a loud clanging gong needs to be resounded.