Yesterday was just another day in the hellish digital panopticon of a world we've erected for ourselves. In case you freaks missed it, we plebs were made aware of the fact that an Amazon employee has hacked Capital One. The hacker was able to acquire identifying information on over 100 million individuals in the US and Canada. Boom! Intimate information like one's email address, home address, social security number, and income is now floating around a dark market somewhere. Being sold to endeavoring criminals looking to take advantage of the cracks that exist in our digital world. Or, God forbid, use the information to find individuals in meatspace to physically attack them.

What's extremely ironic about situations like this is that they enabled by the forced disclosure of this information by corporations claiming they need to collect it for our "protection". Well, I think it's safe to say at this point, having witnessed breach after breach after breach after breach from every type of company you can think of, that it probably isn't a good idea to be collecting all of this data on centralized servers. Or at all for that matter.

Especially the centralized services known as banks, credit card companies and their offshoots that ask for it all. Can we honestly look at the data and say that KYC/AML compliance has been a net good for individuals? I don't think so. How much economic harm has been wrought due to data falling into the wrong hands? Why don't our financial overlords want us to transact in private?

It's all very convoluted and creepy when you begin to really think about it. Why do we put up with this insanity?

Final thought...

Poseidon was angry on Sunday. Still finding sand in my hair this morning.