Technology: Dazed and Confused and Frightened

Technological advances have created a bewildering and cruel world for seniors. In addition to living with the aches and pains of aging, we now have to deal with technology that has advanced beyond what most of us can manage. I learned about computers on the job as a preschool director in the 1990s up to when I retired in 2008. I could manage Word, Excel, QuickBooks, and Quicken pretty well, and was a relatively early adaptor of the iPhone. During this period, I set up and managed my husband’s patient billing on QuickBooks. I felt pretty good about my skills back then. But lately, technology has surpassed my ability to manage many things and several of my peers have been hacked, resulting in a bewildering mess of how to recapture and safeguard their identities.

After my father died in 2012, I helped my mother resolve her computer glitches remotely, which wasn’t really a thing back then. I called Comcast impersonating her. In addition to her address, phone number, and date of birth, I knew her social security number. I identified myself as Evelyn Levine, and when asked for any more information like the model number of her computer or the ID number on the Comcast box, I told whomever was helping me I was 90 years old and couldn’t crawl on the floor to find the number or see well enough to read it. Can’t you help me with the information I gave you? And they did every time. What a different era. I guess I was borrowing her identity, but no harm, no foul.

Now, it’s rather simple for a stranger to steal my identity. The rule is don’t click on any link in an email or text and don’t respond to emails or texts from friends that don’t sound like them, because it’s not them. Ignore all of those texts telling me to pay into my I-pass account when I know I haven’t been on a toll road in months. And never give any information to anyone who calls me, even if their request seems remotely plausible. I have a spreadsheet with over 200 passwords, and I constantly have to invent new ones.

As a senior, I know I am vulnerable to folks who pray on people my age. So cruel because as we age, we are more susceptible to their scams, which have become increasingly sophisticated. But I never comprehended how easy it was to steal people’s most private information and use it to threaten and harass them until it happened to my daughter’s family.

Last week, a woman rang her doorbell. My son-in-law, who is extremely friendly and caring, opened the door

and asked “May I help you?” The woman who came to their home said, “I’m having a hard time breathing the air around here because of your inter-racial marriage.” She then left him a hateful voice mail (no idea how she got her phone number) and added an anti-Semitic diatribe against my daughter.

How could this happen? How could a hateful, probably mentally disturbed stranger know their address and phone numbers as well as the fact that theirs is an inter-racial marriage? Of course, they called the police who took their report and have not been heard from since. No harm, no foul? But if my daughter could figure out what happened, including the woman’s supposed name and phone number, why wouldn’t the police follow up? In her online googling, using the woman’s phone number, my daughter discovered that she had done this to many other people. Don’t ask me to explain how my daughter figured this out. Her explanation about how easy it is to do this type of sleuthing left me dazed and confused, as well as fearful about how much of our lives are not remotely private.

The gist of it is that my daughter has both a website for her home practice as a child psychologist and a website listing for her job as a professor at Northwestern University. Her last name is a combination of her birth name and her husband’s last name. Both clearly identify her as someone Jewish married to someone Asian. The address of her home office is on her website. So that needs to be changed. They had to buy a security light for their porch. No more opening the door to strangers. Now they can see who’s there.

I can’t believe how naïve I was about how safe our private information is in this era of Trump. DOGE broke into government databases and someone, somewhere has every shred of data about me and my family. And then there are the everyday threats of living through Trump’s second term. The grants my son depends on as chair of the Department of Environmental Health at Boston University have disappeared. My granddaughter who depends on Medicaid for her care is threatened. ICE is snatching supposed immigrants off the streets and college campuses, from court immigration hearings, and any place they suspect they may gather. Our colleges are under siege.

Soon, I will to go to Fountain Square in Evanston on June 14 to protest. Will someone be watching me? I hope so.