Reeling under the shock that your Aadhaar data has been hacked again, you’re smacked with the news that your Facebook info has been hacked too. Again. Is there anything about you that isn’t romping around the web? In fact, if you’ve forgotten your password, any random creepy stalker could fish it out in a couple of seconds.
It makes you nostalgic for the old days. Your ma had a security system that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t break into. The-name’s-Bond retired because he couldn’t find the key that was hidden inside the drawer that opened the cabinet, which housed the box in which hid a pouch...
Till tech made it idiot-proof. You were introduced to a devious maze of passwords, designed to manipulate you into complete blathering incapability. You set perfectly compliant passwords with alphanumerics and upper-lower case and those squiggly signs, and forgot them within a week. The only soothing dependability in this system is that you were locked out of your accounts, every month or so.
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Soon, the first cracks appeared. Remember when Facebook data first got hacked? You went into tsumani-alert mode. Shutting windows, deleting pictures, running virus checks. You challenged friends (Is this you? Prove it’s you — what was the colour of the food stuck in my molar cavity when we first met? If this is not you pretending it’s you, this is not me telling you this is not me!) You threw virtual socks full of rabbit-poop at Mark Zuckerberg and questioned the honour of his intentions.
The internet stepped in to your rescue. Your inbox was bombarded with helpful emails about how to save yourself. And the helpful email itself helped itself to your hard drive, cackling as it was hacking, till most of your friends were guilted into transferring large sums for your life-saving nose surgery into an account in Nigeria.
Don’t worry, said the talking heads on TV, you aren’t compromised. Continue to give away your unique identity number to your bank. After all, what can you lose? Just your lifetime earnings? Don’t be petty!
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So, you signed away every bit of your personal, professional and financial life. The app that reminds you when to clip your toenails, assured you that it absolutely needed to have your credit card records. You enthusiastically supplied a couple of sites with pictures of your teen daughter’s holiday. You’ve been obsequious in empowering at least four apps with intimate details of the exact spot you’re at and when.
And then you get hacked! How? How?
But you’re immune to it now. Comfortably numb. What more can they take from you? Let them use your eyeballs to buy a terrorist a phone. There’s just nothing more you can do. When you can’t even prove any more you’re you.
Where Jane De Suza, the author of Happily Never After , talks about the week’s quirks, quacks and hacks .