privacy and security.

i'm not much of a tinfoil hat person (or at least i try not to be), but i've been known to have my alarmist moments. and, of course, i work in the data security industry which gives me a nice vantage point to see what the government et al are trying, in fact, to do with some of this technology. and i have a habit of following pretty closely things like the patriot act and so forth. i do believe that one need not give up one's privacy in order to obtain security.

which is why it mildly surprises me to not be bothered by the fact that my credit card company called me last night about the purchases i had made monday and ask if someone had obtained access to my card. they had all the information about all the money we had spent, and they just wanted to, you know, make sure that everything was cool.

the reason, i think, that i don't mind it is because, while i know that they have access to my purchase record, they do not take advantage of having that information. while you just know that the government, or insurance companies, or advertising companies, or whatever would love to get their hands on your info and make up a nice little cross-referenced database entry on you, the credit card company just...watches for fraud. you can opt out of any and all "data sharing" so that they don't sell your purchasing history to advertisers (see, now if i was wearing a tinfoil hat, i'd say that that's all bullshit and it all gets reported to the government anyway, but i can't wear tinfoil to work because of the static sensitivity of the test boards). actually, my credit card company probably hates me because i did opt out, and i pay my balance in full every month, so the only money they make off me are the merchants' fees, haha.

but anyway. this is, i think, one case where the privacy/security situation has come to a nice balance. they watch my account and call me up if something doesn't fit my purchasing habits, or raises a red flag in their statistical models, and they don't sell my purchase history or deluge me with unwanted and unneeded ads. and referencing a point i made last week (i think), they didn't ask me for my social security number or my mother's maiden name, or any of that crap. just my account number. privacy and security. who would have thought.