I feel as though I am constantly being watched/monitored by nefarious people who are not targeting me in particular but are sweeping me up in a broader data-collecting, identity theft, or misinformation campaign scheme ... and it has led to me being much more reclusive than usual, to the point that I have missed out on a few very major conventions and events (that I really wanted to go to!) because I wasn't "plugged-in" enough on social media.
Most of my anxiety comes from the news stories I read about...
- Data breaches where Giant Company X got hacked and X-million passwords and usernames were stolen by pirates eager to steal everyone's money a tiny bit at a time (because draining an account all at once is a quick way to get caught, but stealing 5 cents every other month from 10,000 accounts is very profitable).
- Malicious hackers who hold an entire hospital or school or small newspaper hostage until they pay huge sums in bitcoin or whatever cryptocurrency.
- Credit/debt card skimmers at the gas station.
- The general cancerous pervasiveness of false news and memes with ulterior motives on social media. (I find myself constantly thinking, "If I 'like' this post, am I inadvertently giving another company permission to access everything about me and all my friends? Is this really an advertisement disguised as a shareable picture?")
- My personal experience with robocalls (and my very strong suspicion that many of these "activate two-factor authentication" messages I get are just ways for Big Company X get my phone number which will get taken by robocallers in a data hack later, or sold directly to the robocallers because Big Company X said they could buried in their ToS they made me tickbox 3-5 years ago).
- The pervasiveness of click-farms that artificially influence review scores, 'likes,' and the general shareability of online content. (I could go on for a while with this list, but I'll end it here.)
While there may be some merit to some of these concerns, the effects have been rather detrimental for me personally. I'm not sure if this is technically paranoia, but I'm increasingly cognisant of and disturbed by...
- The way my anxiety ramps WAY up when a company asks me for my SSN or other very personal information (filing my taxes has been a nightmare! :( )
- My general reluctance to engage directly with people online. If someone follows me on social media who I'm not very confident of who they are or where they come from, I often knee-jerk block them (sometimes I report them too) because I suspect they're a Chinese/Saudi/Russian bot/troll trying to keep tabs on people or are just trying to help some advertiser I don't care for or approve of.
- Fear of the very phone in my pocket which I feel is slowing down all the time not because it's old but because the processor is getting hogged uploading location data and/or usage analytics to Paying Company X who want that because targeted advertising is the latest hotness.
I want to emphasize, even just writing about all this sounds irrational. I know that a lot of this either isn't worth worrying about in the first place or the risk involved is far less significant than I make it out to be (or smaller than any alternative might be). But I can't shake this sense of paranoia that I have and I don't know how to get rid of it but I DO know I don't want to deal with it anymore. Working a full-time job and living on my own for the past 2 years has been stressful enough without this ever-present anxiety that recently caused me to miss two days of fun and learning alongside my friends and coworkers. :(
TL;DR: How do I know if I have paranoia and how do I get rid of it or whatever I actually have that I might be improperly labeling "paranoia?"
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