Buying steak at a hardware store

I am a casual Google Guide. Every year Google treats a few guides to an expense paid trip to the west coast for a gathering of guides. Basically, once you sign up for the program you get points for posting reviews, pictures, and answering questions. As a consequence, prompts occasionally pop up on my phone asking if I would answer questions about a place I have been or currently am. Usually, they are questions like: “Is there a public restroom here?”; “Is there a parking lot?”; “Is parking free?” Since these often pertain to shopping areas, it makes some sense to ask these questions of visitors as there will not likely be any obvious contact to get the information. They are also the kind of question that Google would want answered to allow them to provide complete location information to anyone looking at Google maps. There is another sort of question that would more likely be sourced by an individual.

Recently one of these questions came up and it got me to wondering about how people get information and their choice of sources. The sequence started with “Home Depot – do you know this place?” Having just been there I clicked Yes. The next question was “Can you buy this here – anvil?” So I wonder, ‘Who needs an anvil these days?’ Then the more fundamental question is: Why would you not call the store and ask them, rather than post this to a community of people who may not even know what an anvil looks like, let alone whether Home Depot sells them? Have people gotten to the point that calling and talking to someone is no longer done, even though they are probably posting the question using their phone? If you post the questions, I guess you don’t have to wait on hold to talk to someone who can give you a definitive answer. Perhaps you had a bad experience with people at stores. No matter, it would seem that you would want a reliable source for information.

Trust But Verify

Where do you get your information? Facebook, experts, Instagram, friends? Sources matter. Would you buy steak at a hardware store? Wouldn’t you rather go to a butcher, preferably one you know well, to get your meat? The concept of ‘fake news’ has become pervasive with many feeling that no news source is trustworthy. Ronald Reagan popularized the saying “Trust, but verify” which actually happens to be a Russian saying. With so many sources available these days you would think you could verify something easily. It is that abundance of sources that makes verification so hard. Which sources do you trust and why? Can you trust them all the time?

Which leads us to phishing campaigns that we are all subjected to with increasing frequency. The types of phishing emails that arrive in inboxes span the spectrum from awful in execution to very difficult to distinguish from real. Many times, they take the form of salacious celebrity pictures or gossip, “Just click here.”  A recent campaign involved a supposed legal action against the recipient with the payload being a booby-trapped attachment. After natural disasters or high-profile attacks, phishing emails are circulated dealing with those events.

Appraise Before You Act

Combining these issues with information sources, you can ask yourself, “Is this email from a source I trust?” “Is this from a mailing list I subscribed to?”  “Do I really want to know about this?”  This process is called vetting. You are trying “to appraise, verify, or check for accuracy, authenticity, validity, etc.”. The appraisal part is the quickest way to eliminate phishing emails from your inbox. Get in the habit of appraising emails before acting on them. When you take a minute to do so, it naturally slows down your processing of email but it saves the time you would spend trying to recover from ransomware or trying to get control of your account once it has been compromised.

Water Everywhere

Sometimes when contemplating all the information that is available on the web, I am reminded of a quote from Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

There is an unbelievable amount of information out there, and unfortunately, not all is useful or harmless. Just as drinking seawater will cause you problems, acting on just any information you get from the web, especially via unsolicited emails, can be harmful to your electronic health. These days learning to weed out the bad emails and bad information is critical. If you are a business owner, bad judgment can be fatal to your business. If you are a home user, bad judgment (from bad information) can lead to all sorts of problems from ransomware to identity theft. Be careful out there.