Tracking your Digital Footprint

Apparently now the IRS is getting in on this too. A couple of blogs back I wrote about the power companies installing smart meters to remotely measure our electricity usage but I left out some of the rantings I’d discovered about how that data could be used to mine info on the number of people residing in our homes and how often we use certain appliances etc. and now I've read about how the IRS is using social media and other online sources to track our digital footprint. I get it in lieu of the rash of recent identity theft related tax refund thefts, (I am having trouble figuring out how not to use theft and thefts in the same sentence, but oh well, I’m going with it), and I for one am concerned about how pervasive and secretly invasive tracking my digital footprint might be. I have been thinking how I would like to be a little more under the digital radar, so to speak, and I am pretty sure it isn't even remotely possible. And I am not just thinking about the fact that I write this blog on line and post it publicly on Face Book and Google, but I bank online and exclusively use direct deposit. I swipe cards, get gas for my car with a credit card, and use ATMs, and with all these things considered, I have a very small cash footprint. Then there are those traffic cams, parking lot cams, convenience and regular store cams, and bank and ATM cams that track us everywhere. I have also read about how consumers are tracked digitally through their purchases in stores and on line and that got me thinking about cookies, not in the jar, but on computers.

To top it off, I caught a segment on a local TV station where a tax lawyer was stating the case for a newer, gentler, more accessible IRS and that made me even more suspicious about what the IRS’s new PR spin might be a cover for. Perhaps the letters we use as an acronym (IRS) for the Internal Revenue Service should really stand for the Insidious Relentless Syberspies.