Great. Now we have a new concern: Being important enough to have a hacker leak our emails to all the world.
I've preached here often about how we shouldn't pose for any pictures, print or electronic, that we wouldn't want our mothers to see ... we're in too much danger of hanging ourselves via the abundance of social-media rope, not to mention the unfortunate risk of being victims of "revenge porn."
I guess I should have been preaching about emails, too.
The latest email-hacking scandal: a hack into Democratic National Committee emails. A suspected Russian cyber-attack went on right before the Dems' national convention started last week and some 20,000 emails were published by Wikileaks. It caused enough of a ruckus that DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced her resignation. The emails appear to have bolstered Bernie Sanders' contention that the committee favored Hillary Clinton, to Sanders' detriment.
Epic hacks and subsequent leaks have gotten plentiful lately, involving retail companies (customers' credit-card information); the Ashley Madison website (the roster of cheaters and cheater-wannabes); celebrities and their nude camera-phone photos; and Sony studio executives' emails discussing stars.
As Mark Zuckerberg -- the father of Facebook -- said, privacy is no longer a "social norm." Not in this age of technological newfangledness. You would think this, and the scandals that have borne out the death of privacy, would discourage people from continuing to post stupid, juicy, lurid, profane or racially biased (any race against any race) comments on social media lest they lose their reputations or jobs and such. Well, nah. Too many out there are too angry or too narcissistic/exhibitionist to care about consequences.
If you're like me, you're embarrassed just by the regular stuff you've emailed or texted ... gooey messages to your sweetheart or spouse. "Honey-do" requests to same ("Hey Snookums, would you stop by on your way from work to pick me up some beer/weight-loss shakes/incontinence products?"). Written-word fights with them or with your co-workers. Pictures of you wearing a funny hat at your child's birthday party, or at your office Christmas party, which you know is at least going to make the rounds at the office afterward. So just the thought of leaked electronic correspondences in which you may have confessed any transgression to a friend, griped about your boss or posed for hubby in your lacy knickerbockers, is enough to make you hyperventilate. And geesh, they say old emails stay on the computer hard drive forevermore. What if somebody goes back, hacks and publicizes unfiltered emails you sent out when you were a decade or two younger and had little or no discretion?
If anything, the hackers and the leakers are electronic versions of our moms. Old-school moms warned us gals to keep our legs together (when we sat and when we dated) and to pay attention to how our suitors treated their mothers. They warned daughters and sons to always wear decent, clean underwear in case of an accident; to wipe those nasty looks off our faces in case our faces stayed that way; to keep our voices down. And, of course, they asked us if we really intended to go outside looking like that. A 2014 online article by humor writer Vikki Claflin features "25 Things Ann Landers Could Have Learned From My Mother." She sounded a lot like my mother. I especially like "Mom"-ism No. 23: "Assume every photo of you will be seen by me, your dad, your minister, your boss and your future children."
Not to say old-school moms don't still exist, but their voices tend to be drowned out in the much more permissive society in which we live. Freedom is pushed, but not the notion that with freedom comes responsibility. So we're forced to learn that via suffering the consequences of being careless online. Or witnessing others suffering such consequences in the way we learned lessons as children -- by seeing a sibling, cousin or friend get walloped by a parent.
As I pointed out in last week's column, none of us can assume we're immune to mess. Especially when today's mess includes being "outed" per any electronic words or images we assumed the world would never see. We may not become bigwigs who need to carefully watch or consider everything we say, but it's best to conduct ourselves as though we were.
Hey, don't hack this email address:
hwilliams@arkansasonline.com
Style on 07/31/2016