Growing up in a digital age

One of the lessons I learned growing up is that you become your parents. They leave their mark on you from day one. Well, I haven't always been the best example to my children. My son comes home after spending the afternoon at a friend's house, and using mommy's iPad Pro to play Fortnite he communicates online, and I get to hear about it while driving home how he unlocked the chat feature and told some "friends" online about him and daddy. So we have a talk, and I am stern and tell him all about the evil people who snatch children and that he must never ever tell people enough to identify himself or his family to those potentially untrustworthy strangers online... perfectly channeling my mom. Then I feel guilty that I have gone too far, and backpedal and give him all the good examples of coming together with groups of strangers at a local safe place for a meetup for games like we used to do. There's a difference between online and reality.

Online, you use pseudonyms and protections to shelter your reality from the digital existence front that you put up. That wasn't always the case. Back in the 1980s, phones weren't mobile. You had to physically exert effort to find someone, but the information was usually published in the white pages, and so long as you had a unique enough name and were polite and friendly, it wasn't hard to get information from people. Online, people are crude replicas of ourselves. We react through limited digital interfaces - links to videos or messages walled behind some account-based ecosystem paid for by advertising. I don't think the ads have caused me to buy anything or really to be aware of anything that I wouldn't otherwise be aware of, but regardless, they keep the access free.

I grew up, hang out in nerdy social circles, and found my wife before the age of online match making and social networks. Our culture has blended what I call the digital convergence devices - telephone, audio recorder, video camera, fax machine, email, text, even video communicator - into every screen. We are never more than 2 feet from 3 of these devices. The level of tracking we can do today if you know how is scary. I have worked for multiple companies that track millions of devices with GPS and network signals and gather somewhat of a mapping from your IP address to a real-world physical coordinate. This mapping is both non-exclusive to one company, and accessible to developers like myself. I'm not coming to get your children, and I hope you're not coming to get mine. The truth is far more complicated that we're all vulnerable to smart people with knowledge and skill that can navigate the technology stack and do what we fear.

You have to trust someone.