Millions of Americans believe that alien lizards rule them, you, and the entire world, and this isn't like "I believe that magic might be real." This is honest to goodness, on the same level as how you believe that it's bad to eat raw chicken.
Now it's easy to ignore these people and call them crazy, and you're probably not in the wrong for doing so. However, their deep founded belief - that to them is less belief and more knowledge, that this is true, and that you and me are just a bunch of rubes eager to believe what they want us to believe - reminds us of something. It reminds us that it's not so easy to explain much of what we believe we know, let alone actually go and prove it.
Following the recent news surrounding Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and our privacy, Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has testified in front of US Congress, and perhaps the most revealing part of his testimony is how the lawmakers, the people responsible for writing the legislation that is supposed to protect us, seem to know almost nothing about the very subject on which they're supposed to be writing laws.
My first instinct was, of course, to angrily grumble about how moronic our lawmakers are, but the unfortunate truth, is that we're all extremely stupid about not just some things, but most things. As the internet becomes more and more ingrained in our lives, we're all becoming scarily stupid about a technology that is with us pretty much all the time.
Forget about Google and Facebook, which we've discussed at length - my information for multiple credit cards is held by dozens, maybe even hundreds of companies. I have no idea how many.
Kakaotalk, an app used by 50 million people, most of them Korean (side note: the population of South Korea is only 51 million!), has historically been very quick to hand over its users data to the government. Scarier than the fact that they're giving it to the government is the fact that they had that data stored to hand over to begin with. Why does Kakaotalk need to log the messages I send to my wife? I don't know, I'll bet you don't either, and that's the problem.
Head nod to The Simpsons
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