Remember back when it was reported that having the wrong Facebook friends could actually sink your credit score? That was pretty wild, yet this new report has me even more mad: new employers are actually asking for peoples’ Facebook login and password information during job interviews. Could you imagine sitting there, being interviewed—which is nerve wrecking enough—and flat out being asked for your Facebook login and bloody password so this complete stranger—who may or may not even hire you in the first place—can go traipsing around your private Facebook account?
This should be considered a huge breach of privacy, but it’s not. Our laws have, as usual, failed to keep up with the times and technology in which we live—the same system that condemns a person to death based on faulty eyewitness accounts, DNA evidence be damned, also fails to protect our basic online identities on a regular basis. I am sure the government is absolutely loving this online boom, since it allows them to keep track of us all so much more conveniently.
My middle sister actually told me—prefacing her confession with a shaky “I know you’re not going to like this!”—that she thinks it would be so much more “convenient” for us all to just have something scannable or a chip or something in our arms in order to have our IDs and money available at all times. Seriously?? You have got to be kidding me. Not only is this silly, considering the fact that IDs and accounts change all of the time, and not only is it setting us up to be even more vulnerable to hackers who are much brighter than the minds who create such systems in the first place and would have no trouble getting into our flesh—literally or figuratively—within five minutes, but talk about a huge invasion! An invasion of not just your privacy but of your own person. Do all of these Republican laws on our bodies as women make us so much more complacent in order to consider such things?
I have always been anti-ID and don’t carry mine whenever I can afford it. When I am asked, I often give my passport instead of anything else; I love to see them try to swipe it in their little machines, finally muttering, “I’ll have to make a copy.” Yeah, you go and make your little copy. We should be able to remain as anonymous as we possibly can. We already have to register our vehicles for—what else?—an easy identification system for the cops.
I probably sound like a conspiracy theorist to you, but how can you not in the digital age? You do know that Bush II signed laws into practice mandating that all babies born after 2006 had blood samples stolen from them in order to—to what, we don’t know. Use for research? Develop clones? Who the hell knows? It’s common knowledge now, and though you have to sign a waiver to get a blood transfusion to SAVE your baby’s life, you have no say in this. And we just sit back and take it!
I don’t advocate violence, but what I certainly can’t stand is this lazily sitting back and doing nothing habit we’ve developed. We have privacy issues at risk all across the board—those above as well as so many others, especially medical issues—and they’re not going to just go away without our help.