It's crazy how much things have changed in the past forty some years that I have been on this planet. It's not that we weren't focused on being safe in the past, but it didn't seem to be such a compulsive thing as it is today.
Granted, the world has kind of made that the case with the number of radicals and nefarious characters out there. Take the photo above for example. It was taken at the "Soo" Locks in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Right on the Canadian border where ships travel through the locks from Lake Huron to Lake Superior.
You used to be able to walk just about right up to the locks and watch the freighters and other boats pass through. Since 9/11 happened, they now have those giant retractable bollards at the gate to keep unwanted vehicles from getting in, and the fence above is the extent to which you can see the locks.
As I said, quite the contrast from when I was a kid. @ericvancewalton wrote a really good post yesterday that touched on the new Apple AI initiative (among other topics). With security in mind, or possibly public backlash, Apple has made the decision to handle most AI tasks right on the phone. It's only the more complex things that will be farmed out to the OpenAI servers.
I don't know how accurate that is, but it seems to have so far appeased the security minded as Apple stock reached a new ATH the other day. Which is fine with me since I own Apple stock, but it's also interesting from the perspective that people seem to be more concerned about the privacy of their data these days than they were in the past.
About time right?
It's honestly kind of scary the amount of data this is out there if you have the ambition or the means to find it. Clearly Bozz is just a nickname, but I am sure most people could figure out who I am if they really wanted to try.
A short time ago I finally got around to registering my own web domain. I went to one of my prefered web hosts and I registered the domain bozzcorp.org. I then went in and set up a global redirect so that http://www.bozzcorp.org takes you to my PeakD profile page.
These days many people might not even bother with my site since it isn't a secure http site, but it was a just for fun thing anyway, so I am not really worried about it.
At least now I have my own little space on the web. Kind of like the guy in the photo above.
After I registered the domain I thought about signing up for an email service to use with the domain. It's not like I have any shortage of email addresses to keep track of, but I thought it might be cool to have something tied to bozzcorp.org.
I was looking at Proton Mail as I had used it in the past and one of their big selling points is the fact that they are encrypted and super secure.
Then this news story came across my feed. While the emails you send may be encrypted, if Proton hands over certain pieces of personal information to the authorities, it isn't very hard for them to figure out who you are through a little bit of research. Remember what I said earlier about who "Bozz" really is?
In this case, what they actually did was hand over the recovery email address of the Proton account to the Spanish authorities. While that might not seem like a huge deal, if at some point in your life you realized that buttmuncher69@aol.com wasn't a very professional looking address, you may have created a new one with your actual name in it.
I know I did. The actual name email address, not the butt muncher part.
Based on that recovery address it was pretty easy for the powers that be to track the person down. Apparently, this isn't the first time that Proton has come under fire for breaching this "trust". Back in 2021 or 2022 they release IP addresses to French authorities. They have since removed the clause from their site about not sharing personal information.
I'm not saying terrorists should be able to do whatever they want. What I am saying is that it's interesting how all of us have started to think a little more about the data that is tied to us and how secure and readily available we choose for it to be.
Web 2.0 is notorious rife with data that is not your own. It's no surprise that more and more people seem to be drifting away from it. True, it's not making much of an impact, I would guess more people sign up for those social media platforms in a day than actually leave.
Sites and digital ID's like Hive could be the thing that changes that. We just need to get eyes on it. Thankfully some people are already working on that. Check out my blog post tomorrow to find out more!
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
