A week after I quit my job in early 2012 (for family care reasons, an entirely different bucket of nonsense), I went to my bank branch for routine business. The teller, out loud, apropos of nothing in particular, noted that I “recently had a job change,” and did a little bit of a soft sell about the bank’s IRA products - rollovers and such.
I hadn’t filed for unemployment. I certainly hadn’t told my bank about my “job change.” And yet there at the counter was an hourly-wage teller, entirely unknown to me, who - based on prompts on her screen - knew that I was now unemployed.
Within a week.
And that’s when I knew that data privacy doesn’t mean fuck-all. It’s dead, folks. The only way to achieve it is to remove yourself from the electronic society, which increases the likelihood that you’ll eat poison berries or be eaten by bears. Or both.
So: TSA, banks, etc. That stuff? Transparent data exchange! It’s important. It works!
I’m on week three of trying to get subsidized health insurance coverage through a much-vaunted state exchange.
That? That doesn’t work for shit.
Judge a society by what functionality it ensures.
