Nowhere To Hide

Somewhere out there is a clearinghouse of everything about us...birth info, education info, address info, marriage/divorce info, finance info, who we've lived with, who we were friends with, probably medical info but probably not correct when even our own doctors can't seem to get things right, children info, ownership info, and on and on.

This freaks me out. Not that I have anything to hide. That is not the point. Somewhere this information is compiled and stored. Who does this? I don't know if this info about me is correct. And next, who can access this info? It is not stored for nothing...it is stored in the anticipation that someone, some day will have a use for it. What is the criteria for accessing this info? Who can do that? Who defines a valid need for doing it? And who defines what they will use that info for? That info is about me, don't I have a say?

Middle of last year I sent money to my son in Florida, Western Union. Over the phone I gave the necessary information for this to be done - you know, bank account number, amount, recipient, etc. After taking that information, the phone voice told me they would be calling me back in a few minutes with some "security questions". No cause to 'think twice'.

They called back in a few minutes. When I was finished answering the security questions and hung up the phone, I was speechless. The questions required choosing from multiple possible answers. For example: What car, make, model and year, did you take a loan out for in June 1999?

Okay, that one was pretty simple, but there were a lot more, very detailed questions, like where one of my parents were born, and the one that blew my mind was the name of my former husband's brother's child. They knew that. How does Western Union get their hands on that kind of history, where they can connect me to someone I hadn't seen in probably 10 years, didn't know where they were or what they were doing, and the connection was distant by a marriage that no longer existed???

Conversely, if this distant ex-nephew were to use Western Union, would they ask him who was married to his uncle in 1990? Is that okay? For some unknown entity to be able to compile and then share with another unknown entity that sort of information?

It took me a good amount of time to come to terms with the three credit companies. I'm still not totally there. Something that bugs me is the fact that clerical errors happen ALL THE TIME. What is the quality assurance here? If we don't know who has the information, who is using it, how can anyone ensure that it is even correct? People's lives can easily be destroyed by this dependence on this system of 'security' (?). WTF.

I'm betting that H will have a whole blog on this, too. This scares me.....

Peace