When my brother and I convinced my mom to move to assisted living we agreed that we would leave her house intact – in case things didn’t work out.
After she passed we had to disassemble the place. We gave away what family and friends wanted, donated what had a future and collected bits and pieces found most everywhere.
Towards the end we had a box of keys.
Some obviously belonged to cars from decades past, a few I recognized as door keys from before a renovation but of lot looked like padlock keys or ancient long keys for cabinets or, well, who knew what they opened.
Throwing away unknown keys is hard, the fear being that as soon as a key goes into the trash you’ll discover what it does – or could have – opened.
Ironically, in a perfect world no one would need keys. Keys protect stuff. If you are surrounded by good people who would never consider taking your stuff you wouldn’t need locks, and, no locks means no keys.
Plus, keys are imperfect protectors. Among the necessary skills my dad taught was an understanding of how locks work, therefore what keys do. (A stranger might have wondered why my parents’ house held a dozen nut cracker and picks sets…it wasn’t to get that last piece of walnut out of the shell.)
Anyway, locks are moving away from keys. When I take my neighbor’s roaming dog home I punch in a code and his front door unlocks. Some doors (including in some hotels) open with a signal from a cellphone.
More importantly, that which we want to protect (other than us and our family) seldom rests behind a lock.
Every critical document of mine – birth certificate, driver license, home deed, insurance policies and even my school diplomas – exists in the digital world too. My home computer even has digital copies of almost a dozen death certificates! (Fortunately, none are mine.) This generation expects that every milestone in their life will be recorded and saved in server farms, in cloud storage, in data centers.
Uh-oh.
Yes, the coming mega super-duper data centers consuming more power than great cities will vacuum-up trillions upon trillions of data points and documents every day.
Sure, them that are in charge say they will “protect” private information. You know, the way the FBI protected the names and Social Security Numbers of their agents.
So, perhaps already, for sure in a few months or years, a roving hacker can read about the roadside assistance rider on my car insurance. Or, create a new deed on my house.
We need to be aware that hundreds of monster data centers will be filled up with data about us! No secrets, no forgetting the past. Privacy is not guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution: the profiteers of data mining will never allow that to change.
Yes, all the world’s a stage and all of us actors whether we want to be or not.
Years ago senior citizens got free sale deposit boxes at some St. Charles banks. When that stopped my dad bought a very formidable fireproof, heavy steel box with a complicated key. That held their original home deed, insurance papers, investment information, my dad’s Army discharge and all sorts of critical stuff. Both keys were in that box… Fortunately my dad never locked it: why bother?
Glenn