We all experience it. The jolt when FB pops up with an ad that happens to correspond with something you have had on your mind. Or you go to a new website and the ads are all of your favorite stores and even things you’ve looked at. It’s no surprise that we are all living out loud now, whether we mean to or not, our privacy is gone and it’s one of those things we are just choosing to ignore. Not unlike global climate change I might add, considering how slowly we as humans are reacting to the obvious, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about. Two things have happened that have really stopped me lately, and it worries me because it seems like there is nowhere to hide unless one completely disengages from technology completely, which I don’t want to do. It’s convenient. It’s where I get a ton of information and where I can communicate with friends and family all around the world. But here is the first really strange thing that gave me pause~ My phone broke so I had to go down to ATnT to file an insurance claim. The account is in my husband’s name and the guy helping me said we would have to just file it like we were him. Ok, fine. We then had to go through a series of security questions that were strangely personal and certainly not anything he ever told the phone company, such as: What is the height on your driver’s license? Have you ever had any association with the following addresses? It then gave a bunch of addresses, one being my parents’ address. Just keep in mind, this is assuming it is my husband answering these questions. How weird is that? Why would my parents’ address be part of my husband’s security questions for our cell phones? When I told him about those questions he was just as disturbed as I was, although he seemed more bothered by the fact ATnT knows his height on his driver’s license. (I don’t! I had to guess.) So that was one. This was actually months ago but I was reminded of it this morning when my son got on the Surface, which is like a Ipad, and it was what we took on our Maui trip recently. Now we don’t have TV at our house so when we were at the hotel the guys had fun catching up on what TV is like these days (another thing that continually shocks me) and they got really into a program called Property Brothers. Being out of the TV loop, we had never heard of it before nor watched it, but then today when my son got on the surface to research science experiments (which included youtube) he kept getting ads for Property Brothers. Something tells me that is not a coincidence. It makes me nervous in that can’t-quite-define kind of a way but it definitely feels not right. Big Brother comes to mind in a Big way, and I’m talking about Orwell folks, not another TV show. This is probably something we should all be thinking and talking about more often. Not doing so is only benefitting corporations, certainly not consumers. To disengage or to not disengage…that is the question.