Tech victim? Algorithm is not the culprit

Technology can be many things to many people. It can be indispensable, it can be crazy and it can be dangerous. If your intentions are questionable when you use technology, in the blink of an eye you can be whoever or wherever you want people to think you are. It’s a sad fact that technology has become the primary tool used to deceive people. I think that there are very few people in the developed world who, in some form or another, have not been the target of someone’s deception, whether it’s a scammer calling you with an offer that doesn’t exist, or a dodgy email with a dodgy link or something to do with your credit card. Everyone has a story to tell and in many cases the outcome isn’t very encouraging.

So let me ask you something. Who here has made a decision to buy something, or downloaded an App, based solely on reading its online reviews? So many websites have them and in many cases these reviews are accompanied by star ratings. A five-star rating should mean that the product or service is excellent and a 1 or 2 star rating means you should really stay away from it. So if you see that a product or service is rated 5 stars you go for it. But should you? Think about it? If every comment for a product is given five stars what is its real value? According to experts, very little. They reckon that if every reviewer gives 5 stars, or mostly positive reviews, without any negative comments at all, either the reviewer is affiliated with the product or service or he’s too afraid to tell the truth, for whatever reason. They suggest ignoring the star ratings and focusing on the actual comments about the product. You’d think that people would be only too willing to give something a piece of their mind but I guess we’d be wrong. Therefore, online reviews, especially positive ones, could be fake and, therefore, unreliable.

Another piece of technology that has now become highly unreliable is the caller ID. Back when the system was first introduced, I think it was in the late 90s, they were the most reliable way of finding out who called you, especially if they suspiciously hung up when you answered. All you had to do was to dial a 3-digit number and a voice would tell you what number hung up on you. To be honest, if you were a caller back then, there was no way to hide your number, unless you went to a public phone booth in a location away from your place of residence. It must have been a hassle to do that and, therefore, a superb deterrent.

Now, of course, the caller ID system is the scammer’s playground. If he’s sitting in some obscure country, he can manipulate technology to make it seem like he’s calling you from a major European or North American country. I’ve had calls like that. What gives them away is the accent.

One thing every social media user should be made aware of is that not every message you receive on these platforms comes from the platform management. Gmail users have been a target for several years now. A message often comes through asking the account holder to verify their account by going to a link and keying in their login and password details, failing which the account could be suspended. Those emails are not from Google. They are from scammers trying to get your login details. Similar scams have now popped up on Instagram. The scammer uses someone else’s Instagram account to scare other account holders into keying in their login and password details using a copyright violation notice. The link that the notice leads to looks like a genuine Instagram page but it is not.

Now COVID has scared the hell out of many people across the world. In order to safeguard themselves from this thing they are willing to spend whatever money they have on countless bottles of surgical spirit, hand sanitisers, gloves, bleaches and antiseptic aerosol cans.  One thing that is now making the rounds on internet sales site is some kind of UV light that claims to kill the virus. Before you dash over to your mobile to buy this thing, be aware that it is actually fake. It does not kill the COVID virus.

One last comment about technology. If you’ve been looking for work for some time now, beware of what might be receiving your application form. I say ‘what’ because in many, many cases, it is a robot in the form of an algorithm! Companies feel that using an algorithm eliminates emotional bias in the selection process. I actually disagree with that thinking considering that the algorithm didn’t just materialise out of thin air. It was programmed by a human being who had input from many other human beings – who have emotional bias. So if you’re having trouble getting pass the initial selection process, I wonder if you really should blame the algorithm…