Blake Dowling
Technology can be your best friend and your worst enemy. Have you ever “replied all” to an email when you meant to reply just to the person who sent it to you? Has your phone ever pocket dialed your high-school sweetheart or the FBI?
The “oops factor” in tech is always looming, so make sure you are always diligent with your devices and treat your tablet and phone as sacred.
Also, remember your devices have a mind of their own.
Tech industry leaders like Elon Musk have been warning us that artificial intelligence will take over the world if we are not careful. I think we have a few college football seasons ahead of us before global apocalypse happens but in the meantime, AI is wreaking some havoc. How about Alexa sending out a private conversation between two people to one of the person’s contacts without their knowledge. That happened. The “smart” device heard a series of words within the dialogue that lead it to take several steps. 1) Record the conversation and then 2) send it to a contact. Mind blown.
The potential for scandal, disaster, embarrassment and hilarity are off the scale here.
So, while you chew on that, let’s also look at the other most common part of tech that is infested with oops: social media.
We have seen a renaissance in social media use the past couple of years. It seemed to me that a couple of years ago the worlds of Twitter, etc. had calmed down a little but man then the gloves came off in a big way, especially around the time of the last election.
People, especially politicians, started unloading on Twitter, attacking their enemies, defending their agendas, etc.
Even with all this raw content sometimes people have a “hmmm” moment and delete something.
Not so fast my friends.
There is an entire website devoted to the publication of deleted tweets from your fave politicians. It’s called Politwoops.
According to the site, Sen. Bill Nelson deleted this May 26 after posting it for two hours. I don’t see anything too threatening, and Alan Williams is cool, so who knows why this got deleted. But it did.
You can check out all fun for yourself here, I narrowed it down to just Florida.
So remember to treat your tech like the powerful tool it is and it can be your pal.
Also, give those posts some thought before posting as people are always watching. A lot of you out there might have someone to review your posts for you before hitting the enter button. This is a superb system of checks and balances. Consider putting this into play, especially if you work in the hypersensitive world of state, local or federal politics.
Lastly, considering unplugging those smart devices when they are not in use. As we are starting to see, they aren’t really that smart yet and they could accidentally open you up to a world of hurt by emailing private conversations to everyone you know, in theory.
Have a great week.
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Blake Dowling is CEO of Aegis Business Technologies. He can be reached at [email protected].
