Digital Harassment

By Gordon Hopkins Who would have thought there was a down side to being deeply in debt?Like a lot of Americans, I have some debt floating over my head. I'm in better shape than a lot of my fellow debtors. My house is paid for. My car is paid for. I have a job that, while the pay isn't all it might be (I'm a journalist, after all), manages to cover my usual expenses. Still, I have managed to rack up some debt over the past few years. That's mostly due to the aforementioned house and car. I make the necessary monthly payments, only occasionally panicking that I may not have enough in the bank to cover what I owe.Like most everyone else in America, I'm getting by. It isn't always easy, but I'm getting by.Unfortunately, things are different from the days when my parents had debt. They only had to worry about being harassed if they didn't pay on time. I, however, find myself being harassed multiple times a day, every day, even if I do pay on time. We are now half way through the third decade of the 21ts Century and, boy, how things have changed.I am getting at a minimum five phone calls every day, telling me I am eligible for debt relief or debt consolidation or some other financial sleight-of-hand that, as far as I can tell, won't actually reduce the amount I owe but will make it less painful. Well, I already have access to something that will do that. It's called booze. The truly frustrating part is that the phone calls aren't coming from somebody I can yell at and express doubts about their parentage and suggest a possible place to put their “debt reduction plan.” Instead, they are recordings. Actually, some of them may not even be recordings but script fed into an AI (artificial intelligence). There is little satisfaction in yelling at either a recording or a robot. What really goes against the grain is the way those robocalls try to fool you into thinking you are talking to a real, live human being. Some of them actually use my name, “Hello, Gordon.” I snap back, That's Mr. Hopkins to you, C-3PO!” Others have strategically placed pauses to make you think you are having an actual conversation. Just last night I got a call from a friendly-sounding lady robot that asked me, “You are making your payments on time, right?” and then paused, as if waiting for an answer. I hung up before she could continue. The problem, of course, is that all of our personal information, including our debt, is just floating around in the cybernetic ether, just waiting for someone to access, whether legally by buying my information from one of the many companies and government agencies I willingly gave my data to, or illegally by one of the countless hackers that are way more successful than most people realize because so many companies pay them off. In my opinion, the days when we should worry about how to protect our personal info is over. At this point, you might as well start operating under the assumption that your data is already in the hands of someone you don't want to have it, because it probably is.

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