Personal data management should be taught at very early age as soon as possible

Apart from grasping the reality of omni-online world, we also need new tokens of trust to manage this reality with open eyes.

We are literally walking with our eyes closed. Buying stuff over the internet and even over-the-counter purchases are being screened and scrutinized by several parties with us not knowing and being indolent in this consumerism bliss.

The number of interactions we make with our peers, through chat, sms, video/audio calls, the x and y of our communication with other parties we interact to consume are tallied in hundreds and are often masked via marketing tools so we are not aware that:

> time-killing polls on social media are disguising data collection efforts using our friends list and other data that could profile us for ads sifted through ad exchanges

> free app games, apart from offering us quick upgrades for a buck, also police other apps that are installed on our very personal devices — often used for the same ad targeting purposes

> any login or password we use are recoded, sometimes poorly hashed and as such available to criminals who spoof our identities and try them for every major platform holding an even bigger trove of our personal data — our digital selves.

As the intencity and the number of interaction with our digital selves grow, so does the pressure for service providers to migrate their offerings online — and to the same stance adapts the payment and identity providers — and criminals follow suit.

Any casual interaction can be a step in the abyss, as no longer the dogs from the famous New Yorker cartoon in 1993 can say that no one knows you are a dog on the Internet. Everybody knows. Not only the site where you have bought something. But also a ad service platform that have shown you an ad. Joined by the ad network that would serve you a cookie with the ad and will then re-target you on other websites it caters to. Joined by data broker that provided the website with tracking software to get your other cookies and track your overall web preferences.

This increased inquisitiveness creates unnecessary friction between those standing guard by our digital selves and those trying to unmask us. Ad-blockers provoke revultion from websites that block content if the ad-block is on. Leading to VPN tunnelling and other tricks to rob one of the true identity, leading to increased costs of serving us content and services for the marginal cost we have for long appreciated the Web for.

This situation is further exacerbated by the malfeasance and poor skills of us providing our data at the very beginning — where we kickoff with a noob mentality and end with a paranoid one. Passwords has never been our strong suit. They are more predictable than a set of keys we get for our apartments (hence, a future of smartphone apps opening our doors and cars need to be thought through and be based on something better than a thing we are forced to make up).

We rationalize our behavior with N+1 encounter and ruin the whole system as anyone trying to penetrate your digital perimeter would scout for breadcrumbs we leave on every standard website (standard being for the platforms we go to facilitate the de-rigeur norms formed by the increasingly digital society).

As serious industries that migrate and try to adapt the social elements and instant access we demand as these norms are formed by services we go yo most often, they are under threat of the very fallacies we suffer for as human beings. As the rationalizing is part of a human being stress management mechanism, there would be never a future of us comforting the demand of a professionally-schooled security staffer.

The end means need to find the human part we all adhere to and build the secutiry mechanism from the ground up, else the N+1 interaction, already interwoven with payments going in background of commerce web-services built in social networks, using geolocation meta-data etc — will deal a huge blow to the whole system.

The data management rules need to be explained at very early age, but they need to account for the human side that we use to deal with the increaing flow of data we consume.