Making Up Stuff to Worry About

I get a lot of emails and I actually try to read them all. I am still amazed at the number of forwarded emails I get warning me about things that are just not true. There are so many things in this world to worry about (apparently even spinach) that is amazes me that people find pleasure in making more things up and then spreading them around the internet. In a way, these warning are a form of computer virus in that they are designed to be spread eating up bandwidth and, in effect, slowing down the world wide web.

Here is one of the latest making its way around the web:

Southern California law enforcement professionals assigned to detect new threats to personal security issues, recently discovered what type of information is embedded in the credit card type hotel room keys used through-out the industry.

Although room keys differ from hotel to hotel, a key obtained from the Double Tree chain that was being used for a regional Identity Theft Presentation was found to contain the following the information:

• Customers (your) name
• Customers partial home address
• Hotel room number
• Check in date and check out date
• Customers (your) credit card number and expiration date!

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This would be a very important warning, except that it just isn't true! Check out this article about the issue on snopes.com:

Claim: Hotel room keycards are routinely encoded with personal information which can be easily harvested by thieves. - snopes.com

Just doing my part to help you worry less.

peace,

will