Just got a very stark reminder about how predatious and evil metadata collection is.
Reconnected with a family member, well, stepmother, technically, but I haven't talked to them in over a decade. Ultimately a good thing.
What happened was, though, she got an automated robocall using my real name, saying that there was something extremely urgent that I had to deal with. She's probably around 70 or she years old, has never been very tech savvy, but luckily she just listened to the voicemail that was left and didn't engage with this scammer and texted me about it. So that's good.
But what it made me realize is that because, again, due to her lack of tech savviness and whatnot, we contacted each other with vanilla SMS, which probably means a couple of things might have happened. Between my phone carrier and hers, somewhere along the lines, metadata got collected and they drew a correlation saying that because we have been connected in the past and have just now reconnected, it is now new connection data and data brokers eat that shit up like gold. Leading to her to get a spam call about me in a relatively short amount of time after reconnecting. It's been like barely three weeks.
The behavior is so genuinely disgusting to me, and the fact that it is legal is even more disgusting. Anyways, stay safe out there. Protect your loved ones. And for God's sake, never communicate with a regular vanilla means I guess.
