This last week, we took our eldest daughter off to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. This marks a significant milestone for both her and us as parents. She has total control of her choices with little required input from her parents. She will need to make the right choices at the right times. We will have more complex finances to manage among a myriad of family dynamic realities of a physically separated household. She may no longer be living under our roof,…
We received a call at the house last night that was strange and a little disturbing. The caller said they were with our bank and needed to confirm our identity before speaking to us about an important matter. They reported to be with our bank, and they had that information correct. However, they wanted to confirm our identity by using our Social Security Number. I laughed and said no. The person told me this was important financial information, and that it…
An elephant never forgets? Forget that. Try getting something pulled off-line when you really need it to go away. As you will quickly find out, it is nearly impossible to remove information completely off of the Internet once it has been posted. The Internet is such a distributed network with caching and proxy servers all over the world that once information is posted online it is part of that information collective and extremely difficult to sanitize (make it disappear permanently.)…
A short time ago, a friend of mine picked up a few spare hard drives. He was looking for older model hard drives to put on the shelf for when his low-priority legacy servers’ hard drives die. When he got back to the office, he dropped the hard drives into a computer to test and wipe them. While chatting last week, he told me he found a tremendous amount of Very Personal information on the hard disks from financial, tax, and…