The Male Hysteric

I was listening to the Alicia Navarro episode of Crime Junkie (don't judge me) and was struck by how much of the advice, understanding, and information about teenagers meeting sketchy people online has not changed in the past, oh... since I was doing it, so about fifteen years. And that is absolutely wild to me, because here I am, a grown up, who could literally tell you all about talking about strangers on the internet as a teenager and it being a formative experience. It was even stranger given that Brit, the co-host, gave a cursory nod about it being a formative experience for her but she didn't speak on it at all, instead giving priority to the same pablum that's always been said on it.

It's also weird that the advice and understanding is the same even though the internet was so different fifteen years ago! Kids rarely posted their full names online, or photos of themselves, or much about themselves beyond their interests and personal problems when they were conversing publicly on interest forums. Now, instead of every type of interest being separated into their own forums and there being spaces that were created to be kid- and teen-friendly like neopets and gaiaonline, everyone is shoved onto the same four social media sites where they're encouraged to post all sorts of personal information including photos and videos of themselves, or they're playing video games online where their voice is used to communicate which creates no record of what was actually said.

So much is made out of parental responsibility about this but there are so, so many ways that companies online have failed kids due to rampant need to monetize. A big part of this has been Youtube with various controversies from the video content directed at kids to the fact that algorithms in Youtube have been directing pedophiles to CESM. The destruction of forums has destroyed all but the broadest lines of moderation, and all of that moderation is focused on keeping the platform making money by keeping it in the Apple Store and the like, scrubbing sexual content not "for children" but for wealthy investors who think gay sex is icky. And this isn't even counting the culture these platforms encourage -- some kids were making carrds and insisting on full names, ages, marginalizations, mental and chronic illnesses etc. to be visible for people they interacted with and putting that information out there to be easily accessible is so dangerous not just from "internet predators" but also for way more mundane purposes.

The internet isn't even being made for humans in mind anymore, much less kids, and navigating it is way different than it was when I was a teenager -- so why are we stuck giving out the same advice on To Catch A Predator?

Yesterday Adrian Sanabria posted a twitter thread about the recent Equifax breach’s House Oversight Report, see here, unroll here, directly to the House Oversight Report here. Considering 2018 has been the longest year on record, I’ll forgive you if you managed to forget about this breach. This is the one back in late 2017 where Equifax managed to allow personally identifiable information of over half the adults in the United States be compromised. I remember saying to a friend that at this point it would be easier to just give everyone a new social security number, it was that bad — and I was only half-joking

Anyway. This breach was allowed to go on for an astonishing 76 days due to a lack of leadership and general incompetence and negligence at Equifax. Right before seeing the report, I’d finished watching the first season of Mr. Robot. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Robot, it’s a TV series where some hackers take down a large conglomerate from the inside because of the conglomerate’s unethical practices. Looking at the findings of the Equifax breach, what happened here is pretty much the opposite of the plot of Mr. Robot. Consider that, in Mr. Robot:

1. The security of the major conglomerate is actually competent and only manages to be taken down by internal malicious actors.
2. The hackers do not aim to victimize the ‘little guy’, AKA you, the normal viewer and consumer.
3. The organization is actually harmed by being breached.

( That last bit is the important bit. )