Trust The 'Net? Never!

Sure, the internet is good for kicks and giggles. I enjoy blogging, posting pictures on Facebook and trouncing my opponents in fantasy football.

But do I trust it with my most closely guarded secrets? Do I want to transact all my confidential financial business on-line?

Absolutely not.

However, it seems that we're all being pushed in that direction. They want me to bank on-line, pay bills online and of course forever shop on-line.

Despite gentle prodding by the government, I refuse to even do my taxes on-line. When they make it free and absolutely secure, maybe. Until then, no. But the Internal Revenue Service just sent me a notice that said they're not even going to mail me a tax return this year. Since they expect me to file my taxes electronically, they will no longer mail out paper forms.

I'll tell you what, IRS. I'm going to leap ahead technologically here. I'm sending my tax returns in by thought transfer. Saves postage, computer bandwidth and your precious paper. Just give me the name of the appropriate IRS clerk and I'll start mentally beaming him the figures.

At work this year, they've stopped mailing out the booklet containing our benefit options during open enrollment. Look it up on-line, they say.

Check-writing also is becoming a thing of the past. Now it's debit cards and wire transfers. But at our house we still write checks and neither my wife nor I own a debit card. They've notified my wife this past month that she can't add minutes to her cell phone by calling on the phone. Use the internet instead. And now they're even pushing for on-line voting.

Why don't I trust the internet? C'mon. Google "Identity Theft" in Google News and you get 2,481 hits. It's that common.

Just the other day I got an e-mail from my son Greg. The subject line was about a highly pigmented eyeshadow palette he had just bought. What? Had my son joined a punk rock band or something? Turns out that somebody stole his e-mail address and address book. Now they're spamming all of Greg's friends and family.

Here's something I just read here JUST TONIGHT. There's a program called Firesheep that adds a tool that shows when anyone on an open network -- such as a coffee shop's Wi-Fi network -- visits an insecure site. A simple double-click can give a hacker instant access to the unsuspecting user's logged-on sites including Twitter and Facebook. Since researcher Eric Butler released Firesheep on Sunday, the add-on has been downloaded nearly 220,000 times.

That's a lot of hackers trying to get my information. That's a lot of reasons for me not to put my confidential personal information on-line.

Hopefully it won't come to me having to take down my blog because nefarious forces have taken it over. If that does happen, I WILL go to thought transfer. If then you receive a series of streaming mental uploads from a "Big Dave" on a Tuesday night, that'll be me.