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Sigh, it has been only a month back... and I'm not entirely sure where the leak is (but I have my suspicions...), and my phone number is already collecting an unwelcome amount of spam and scamming text messages! In the Netherlands, I was picking up maybe one or two per month... and here in Australia, I seem to picking up a few each week. Now, I'm pretty sure that Australia being a relatively rich first world country, and having English as a primary language has quite a lot to do with that. For scammers to craft messages in Dutch would be a bit of a waste of resources, but to craft them in English means that you have a much larger pool of targets in the developed world.

I've also heard that Australians are considered to be relatively easy marks as well... I'm not sure if that is true or not, but there does seem to be quite a number of news stories about Australians falling prey to banking and other computer trojans.. if not just outright phishing email/contacts.

A little while baclk, I was having a little gripe about how the contact tracing of the last two years of corona-time has trained a really bad security habit... namely, just scanning every QR code in sight, for check-ins through to just ordering and viewing menus at restaurants. Now, it is clear that QR code tracking is pretty useless as the spread of the virus means that it is impossible to keep pace, and in response the authorities have stopped using the QR codes for tracking (they are no longer mandatory unless it is a special venue like a hospital or something similar.).

Depressingly enough, I just read a news article that said that Australians are still just checking in regardless... and the reasons given are that they like having a history of where they have been, and ingrained habits, and the mistaken belief that the tracking regime is still working... well intentioned, but unfortunately completely out of date. Worse still, people don't seem to understand that your phone will track you WITHOUT you needing to check in everywhere... If you want to view that data, you can just use Google Maps and have a look at your history... if you are really really desperately need to know where you were five days ago at exactly 16:38:69 in the afternoon! I'm not entirely sure why anyone needs to know that...

What I have found in Australia, is that everyone everywhere is constantly asking you for your email and phone number... mostly to spam you with their own marketing crap... sorry, to offer you discount deals and membership/loyalty bonuses. The worst are the real-estate agents (they always are the workst...). When you visit an open house, they ask you for your email/phone so that they can send you details about the house that you are viewing... and then they attach you to a marketing list in addition! It is incredibly annoying, and I think I will send an email flood to the most egregious ones... after all, if it is okay for them to spam me, I guess that it is okay for me to send them 100 emails per second. Fair is fair?... sigh, pity that I'm a nice guy and will probably talk myself out of it...

At least for the emails... I give them a crap dump email that is made especially to house all this crap that they send. However, the phone number is more problematic... I suspect that they don't really secure their data harvest that well... and I suspect that that is how my phone number has gotten out into the spam/scam contacts... maybe not, but I do prefer to blame the real-estate agents!

So... I will be hunting around to find burner numbers that I can hand out... it is annoying that it has come to this, but I fear that this contact detail leakage is a worse problem here than I had experienced in the Netherlands. If I'm going to live here, then I think I will definitely try to make sure that I'm not going to be the lowest hanging fruit!

I can also be found cross-posting at:
Hive
Steem
Publish0x

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