I just recently had my bankcard re-issued. It was causing all sorts of problems since getting flagged in one of the Target/Home Depot/ Michaels, et al, hacking snafus. Those out-of- town trips I took this year brought the issues alive and they wouldn’t go away.
Security and keeping our identity in an increasingly electronic and criminal world is becoming a critical matter.
My blogging had been harried for years with my sites getting hacked. The amount of work to cleanse them and get them secured took away huge amounts of energy and effort that should have gone into writing. I was not alone and very smart people have been working hard to make it easier for the rest of us. Plugins, regularly updated themes, new versions of WordPress…. all go towards making the hackers less successful. Yet, as seen by the leakage of such activities into the business world, when they they are successful they pack a wallop of damage.
There are so many scams, and many come in the form of an email, or with other everyday activities like simply using your debit card in a normal manner. We have to be vigilant, and sometimes mistrust situations that are unknown to us (isn’t that a large part of life?)
It doesn’t seem fair, but in a way it is an extension of the wide open spaces and license of modern life. The old rule of ‘no rules leads to totality of restriction’ is thriving and we don’t even seem to really notice. Not really. The frog voice might say, “it seems to be getting a bit warmer”, but it becomes stifled.
We should protect our identity, not just on credit cards or social security numbers, but in our personal selves. We should secure our personal boundaries.
I have watched a loved one give away her personal identity to a predatory personality who has robbed her of her creativity, her personal joy, and enslaved her to constant “needs”. It makes me so sad, but we have to be willing to take responsibility for our own security and identity. Just like I had to work at making sure someone din’t take over my websites, or damage my ability to access my bank account.
Sometimes it meant a time consuming re-installation of a clean slate, new files, or issuing a new card. Sometimes that is what we must do in our private lives in relationships. We have to close off the avenues that hackers take to intrude and wreak havoc. we have to face that sometimes they just do it for personal entertainment, but sometimes with the purpose to rob us of all we have.
We must face the facts, not someone else.
We must make the boundaries.
We must do the work.
To vouchsafe who we are and what is important to us is worth it.
