Remember the chain letter? You know, the message you sent to 20 friends, urging them to send to 20 of their friends? You may need to send money, a recipe, a poem to the top five on the list. Add your name to the bottom. Do this within a certain time frame, and soon you can expect to receive dozens of the same sent items in return. Failure to this can result in bad luck or even death! These letters can be manipulative and threating. They implore you to keep the chain going. Don’t break the chain! They are annoying. But are they harmless?
Amazingly, many adults still perpetuate this tiresome correspondence. But I recently had one sent to me by my young grandson. It was a text message that began, “Read it all. I mean it. Read it all.” I did. It was lengthy. The sentiment behind it was that he cared and loved me. I responded to him that he should not fall for this junk. Do not forward to anyone else. Delete it. Or I will subject him to a 30 minute lecture about this. I ended with “I love you” to which he responded, “I love you too.”
Today, the chain letter has gone electronic. No more stamps and snail-mail. With a click of a mouse you can duplicate and send these out to multiple email addresses or text contacts. So there goes your email to 20 people. Now, those 20 people send it to 29 of their friends. This is just the first iteration of the chain and now your email address or phone number are in the possession of 400 strangers. The chain continues and next your contact information is in the hands of 8,000 strangers. You can see how quickly you have lost control of this situation. What appeared to be a fun game suddenly turned into a potentially dangerous situation.
Spam emails and texts are never appreciated, but can you imagine this list of emails and phone numbers getting loose in the wild? How can you be sure that some of the folks that contact you are not crooks with malware links or virus infections?
Sounds fun, huh? NOPE! Don’t create problems for yourself. Navigating through the digital world has lots of issues. You need to be aware of privacy issues, hardware and software updates and safeguarding all of your digital assets.