Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to talk about how something innocent can turn nefarious.

Show Me Your Badge

Digital "award" badges - cool or nefarious?

I may be a little paranoid or off the deep end on this one, but one of the things I've noticed a fair bit of lately is an increasing amount of companies and other places offering "badges" for us to add to social media to share and form some type of community. On the face of it, it sounds like a decent notion.. but at the same time I have to wonder if it's a little nefarious in intent?

I've got some certifications and other accomplishments that I've gotten over the years and lately, one of the things that the companies that offer such things have been doing is asking me to add some type of "badge" to my social media accounts to represent that certification. I think their intent is likely decent but I get a little annoyed at that type of stuff. Professionally we can collect the badges and store them in an office or something but in the online space I think a bit more of it is on the data collection aspect.

I was okay with the concept when it was just giving me a picture of the badge to add to the page but where it went awry with me is when they wanted me to click on a link to claim the badge, and from there link and log into the social media I would add it to. That threw up some red flags for me because I know how utterly lacking many companies are in their security infrastructure. The more places that we "log in" an app to, the more places that the credentials are vulnerable and apt to getting stolen and causing us a headache.

I think the likely scenario is they were offered some fancy new gadget by the companies to make an integration with their software which is okay, except that the companies are utterly obsessed with data collection and selling of said data that I had no qualms about thinking it was largely just a manipulative event on the social media companies. More things they could charge these other vendors for, while on the other hand sell the data that they are capturing to lord-knows what groups, governments and the like.

All of this was very web2.0 mindset to it, where the end-user is always the product to be sold like a piece of cattle to a slaughterhouse. I certainly took a screenshot of the credential and added it to some places but there is no way that I am going to link it via metadata to those places because that's just asking for a headache in 6-12 months. So many companies silently report that they had their data sold, or even intentionally sell data to third parties without telling people! Just look at 23andme selling our fucking DNA to the CCP. I'm pretty sure most of the people who signed up for that service may not have if they knew that the company was going to sell it's ENTIRE database to the Chinese without a second thought.

I keep going back to something I heard several years ago, and it rings true all the time: data is the new oil. Make sure to protect your data as much as you reasonably can!

What about you, have you thought about these things? Why or why not? Let me know in the comments!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI. All pictures are mine unless otherwise stated}

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