I spent my career as a computer scientist, specifically in data modeling and database architecture. Data quality and security were always front and center in any project on which I worked. People use computers because they expect the data delivery to be consistently accurate. Duh. You would be surprised how many people take this for granted. We stare at our little screens pretty much every day, in our digital lives. Where do you think all these data comes from? It’s either keyed in and checked (or should be) by a human, converted by a speech-to-text engine, or loaded into the database from an external source. We would not spend so much time looking at our little screens if we thought it was inaccurate. If it’s entertainment, that’s one thing; if inaccurate, that’s another.

At the end of the argument about computers, people, and information, I've learned to never trust anyone with my personal data, and I never will. I've seen too much. From what I can tell, anyone who has insisted on having it has lost it to the internet, and with no real accountability for the damage it's caused. Granted 2 years of “free” data monitoring services, many of us trudge through life, not because our information is safe, as we expect (or were promised?) but rather because some other hacked database, not under our personal control, surrendered our SSN, name, address, etc. More accurately, not just stolen but also copied.

I learned way back at the beginning of the 8-bit microcomputer revolution that there were no uncopiable disks, no matter how hard the engineers tried. There is no file encryption strong enough to keep another engineer out of it. It's all just math in the end, stored as 1’s and 0’s from which we can represent literally any numeric value. Data security has many layers. And to make it worse, that landscape is always changing. We are our own worst enemy.

My observance was so consistent that, in 1999, I finally documented it as a razor: