Big bad data
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 152
ANDY ROONEY 2.0 DEP'T.
When Did Stealing Things Online Get Easier Than Buying Things Online?
THE WEATHER APP on my phone and the weather app on my wife's phone have different weather. Both phones are iPhones, and both are running the Apple weather app set to New York City, though the phones are different models and the software is in different versions, so the layout of hers doesn't match the layout of mine. But the mismatch isn't some subtle aspect of how the apps operate: sometimes her phone says it will rain, or even that it is raining at the moment, while mine says it won't or it isn't.
My phone seems to be the wronger one. A few nights ago I heard the sound of rain beating on the roof through the bathroom vent, and I looked at my phone and it said the weather was clear. When I went out on the balcony for direct information, rain was in fact falling.
I started using the Apple weather app because the weather app I previously relied on is currently telling me it's 85 degrees and partly cloudy in New York, while it's really 75 and sunny. It also says today is Thursday the 24th—of June 2024, presumably, which I think was more or less when my whole weather app situation started breaking down. The old app began asking for permission to harvest and market my location data, rather than just using my location data to tell me what the weather was doing where I was, and when I said no, it responded by glitching out across time and space.
Real minute-to-minute weather-heads used to use an app called Dark Sky, but before I ever got around to trying it, Apple bought it and said they were folding it into the Apple weather app. Apparently they left out the feature that tells you it's raining when it's raining.
Remember when people believed that technology marches ever on? Twenty-first technology lurches backward, spinning in tight little circles. Over the holiday weekend, I tried to buy something on sale online from Adidas. When I hit the checkout button, the website said the credit card payment had been rejected. I reentered the card information and tried again, and the message said that the payment had been rejected again. I went to the bank website, and the credit card had the pending purchase from Adidas on it, twice.
I called the bank and the bank said that it hadn't rejected the charges, and that I should talk to Adidas. I called Adidas and they said the purchase hadn't registered with them. I couldn't buy the product; I could only pay for it. They were having trouble with their website, Adidas said. I should wait a day and try again. The next day, when I went to try again and it still didn't work, Adidas suggested I might need to stop using the Adidas website and go shopping through the Adidas app. Adidas AG had more than $23 billion in sales last year, somehow.
All the while, on my desk lay a letter from a company I had never heard of. "We are sorry to tell you about a privacy event," it began. By "privacy event," they meant that hackers got into their system and stole 4 terabytes of health insurance data, belonging to maybe one-third of the population of the United States, probably including me. This was a totally separate privacy event from the one last month where hackers stole nearly every Social Security number in America from a data broker. In the hack I got the letter about, the company wrote that it "may have" had and lost my information, because it works "with many doctors, health insurance plans, and other health companies to help provide health services or benefits."
The country is full of these companies that collect and store your data without ever asking or telling you about it. But it only turns into a data breach when somebody else steals it from them. Then you get the letter apologizing for someone having stolen what the company had taken, with an offer of a year or two of fraud monitoring. What are the villains going to do with your stolen credentials, buy some Sambas online?
SIDE PIECES DEP'T.
The Editors
FOR FLAMING HYDRA'S ongoing series on The Lost Internet, I wrote about my long-gone personal blog, and about its even more long-gone audience:
Where have they gone? In the years between then and today, readers became concrete—concrete, specific, and, in meaningful quantities, hostile. Comments became the norm and then broke free from the stories to become the entire setting in which the life of words took place. Every medium is a social medium now, and that society is often an unsympathetic one. To post something is to know you’re going to inflict it on strangers, and that some of those strangers will be spoiling for a fight.
FOR FLAMING HYDRA, Joe wrote about vacation injuries and a medical mystery.
Joe MacLeod
I don’t think I have Lyme disease (you know I went and Googled all that stuff, yow) but I also don’t know if I don’t have Lyme disease? I am gonna go get it checked out, because when people tell me about their suspected malady that’s what I always tell everybody to do, after I roll my eyes so very hard. [SLOT-MACHINE-CLICKS-SOUND EYEROLL] “Huh! Yeah, I would go get that checked out.”
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, September 2, 2024
★★★★★ The clouds were shining white, their texture and contours shaded in dove gray, against saturated blue. The windows had been open for a while before the thermostat in an overlooked air conditioner found it warm enough to briefly cycle on. The cream-colored pants went through the wash to hang up in the dry air, on their way to the depths of the closet until the seasons cycled around. A grill, a half-full sack of briquettes, and a can of lighter fluid sat waiting on the sidewalk. On the late side of midday, crossing the torn-up expanse of Amsterdam with a bag of groceries was hot work, but that was simply good reason to take a little nap in the comforting afternoon breezes. Leaves flickered and a pigeon's wings flashed in the pure, strong, lowering sun. The light twinkled on the pencil and cut long bright stripes through the translucent rings of the notebook. All afternoon looked like the golden hour, and then the golden hour arrived.
ASK THE SOPHIST
Tom Scocca
Welcome to the Ask The Sophist Archive!
Look at all these problems people have had—which turned out, on inspection, not to be problems at all! Wouldn't you like to have your own problem resolved so neatly? Send your questions to Ask The Sophist at indignity@indignity.net.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from The Swedish, French, American Cook Book, by Mrs. Maria Mathilda Ericsson Hammond, published in 1918, and now in the Public Domain and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Crab Sandwiches (Sandwiches au Crabe)
Take the crab meat, well picked free from shell; season with little Worcestershire sauce, pepper, salt, and a squeeze of lemon. Cut bread very thin; spread with mayonnaise dressing, highly seasoned, then with the crab meat. Put on top another thin slice of bread that has been spread with mayonnaise; press down; trim all the crust off; cut in any shape desired. [Lobster or shrimps can be used in the same way but they must first be ground.] Arrange on paper doily. Serve for afternoon tea.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
MARKETING DEP'T.
Supplies are really and truly running low of the second printing of 19 FOLK TALES, still available for gift-giving and personal perusal! Sit in the crushing heat with a breezy collection of stories, each of which is concise enough to read before the thunderstorms start.
LESS THAN 5 COPIES LEFT: HMM WEEKLY MINI-ZINE, Subject: GAME SHOW, Joe MacLeod’s account of his Total Experience of a Journey Into Television, expanded from the original published account found here at Hmm Daily. The special MINI ZINE features other viewpoints related to an appearance on, at, and inside the teevee game show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, and is available for purchase at SHOPULA.
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