Category Archives: Technology

Social Rules, Technology

The Talking Dead of Our Youth

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Please forgive the undercurrent of snark, as I discuss the “Talking Dead” who live among us…

Last week, 4 different friends posted versions of the old meme, “Aren’t you glad we did THIS instead of THAT,” referring to pictures of being outside playing instead of on their devices when they were younger. I know you’ve seen these memes; most of them have children smiling as if the dentist just administered a quadruple dose of laughing gas and then catapulted them out the window – banished to stay there until mom hollered for them from the partially-opened front screen door. According to the nostalgic memes, no one ever stayed indoors. Evidently, we were too busy enjoying the splat of mosquito bites, Michael Jackson wannabes offering us candy from the open side door of a poorly-painted white van, and the sheer unmitigated joy of simply being outside – as if in truth our parents hadn’t forbidden us to come back inside until we were called. The rest of us were outside precisely to avoid the dangers lurking inside our houses.

The weird disconnect for me is that most of the “Talking Dead” have their phones out 24/7 and display symptoms of paralysis when they are without their devices. At least once a day I observe someone ‘freaking’ a little when they’ve misplaced their phone, the battery goes dead, or their device won’t function properly. They wander about like zombies or blind cavefish, eyes glazed, talking about seemingly nothing else. Gollum would be envious of the idolatry of their electronic devices.

All of them get defensive and pissy when I ask them why they need to have their phones by the bed, for example, even though they complain about it accidentally waking them. (Duh.) When I point out that it is possible to set parameters for emergency calls only, they recoil in horror, as if any limitation to being accessible is somehow objectionable. Our daytime hours are populated with the buzzes and pings of the devices of those who must be on constant alert, as if Star Fleet is going to call us to battle at any moment.

We evolve to use the technology available to us, tempered by disposable income and opportunity. To believe that anyone who now lives with their phone in their hand or pocket (or by their bedside at night) would not have done the same had the technology been available when they were younger is welcome to take a polygraph and get back to me.

It’s okay to have appreciated your time outside when you were younger. But if you would have had our current technology then, you might still be up in the tree but your hands would still be furiously scrolling and typing into the great internet, undoubtedly spending an hour telling me how wrong I am about your compulsion.

Comparing now to then in any respect is just another version of the “it was better back when” argument that serves only to highlight one’s age. And if you are one of the many who simply can’t walk to the bathroom without a phone, please don’t post memes about the golden days of youth, when you were outside, eating crickets or whatever thing you now glorify.

I love technology, especially when it is used creatively or as a tool. The phone isn’t the issue and it never has been.

PS: For many, the cellphone is the new purse; a repository of secrets.

Social Rules, Technology

Prince and Privacy

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What prompted this rambling post is that I made a Prince-themed picture for a Facebook friend. I made some graphics and ended up with something unusual and personal, as she was a major Prince fan. I used a high school yearbook photo of my friend that she didn’t even own. It is true that I had to use hop-scotch and logic to surmise her maiden name and geography, but I’ve done this so long that it was overwhelmingly obvious that the picture was indeed her when I encountered it. When I did an ancestry.com search, even though my Facebook friend is still alive, the amount and breadth of information was staggering. (PS: The more unusual your name is, the greater the likelihood that you can be found with much more speed and volume of information.)

I often forget that not everyone understands the sheer magnitude of the internet. There is nothing it fails to touch. Regardless of the number of posts I write above privacy and data volume, I routinely surprise someone with pictures of their junior high year book, their birth date, relatives they never knew they had, secret marriages and divorces divulged, or comments they wrote 15 years ago on a “We Love Axes” message board.

I’ve had situations where people assume I am stalking them or somehow have done something untoward to access information or pictures of them. While I don’t condone stalking, I hate to admit that I am still shocked at this reaction. Stalking requires effort and dedication to match the twisted mind of the person motivated enough to actually stalk another person.(My Facebook friend didn’t believe I was stalking her, to be clear, but she was definitely surprised…)

Since I live among normal human beings, I go back and read a reminder I wrote to myself in an old blog. The reminder tells me to pretend that the person in question just started out on the internet – and therefore is honestly surprised. Even when someone is a writer, actor or lawyer in real life, they are still prone to misunderstanding the reach of the internet in their lives. Once I can imagine the person involved honestly feeling exposed to it for the first time, I am once again sympathetic and feel uneasy at being the one to show them. It’s not my intention to ‘out’ them to the internet or make them feel violated.

The internet is exactly like a room full of stacked and folded newspapers. You might need  a year to go through them to find your name, but it is a certainty that your life is described somewhere in those papers. Over time, someone reads, indexes, and scans all those papers, page by page, thousands and millions of them. And so, your life gets increasingly searchable. You don’t get to vote on whether it happens, or even to what extent.

We sit in a seemingly infinite pool of data. It’s an inhospitable place if you want to feel like you live a protected and quiet life.

 

 

 

 

Social Rules, Technology

11112014 Facebook and Social Media Reveal More Than You Realize…

Originally, I had snippets of posts from people on FB. Some of the profanity, violence, and anger is difficult to reconcile with living, breathing people. Were it 1 or 2 instances of this, it could be chalked up to hyperbole, accident, or a misunderstanding.Whether our president, senator or city council is liberal or conservative, I hate that people I know would resort to calling for hanging, beheading, or violence toward them or their families.

Personally, if you are frequently posting or hitting ‘like’ on posts that contain inflammatory and hateful language such as this, you are approaching some level of responsibility for it. If you hit ‘like’ where the majority of the people posting are saying things like this, all your protestations notwithstanding, it’s logical to deduce that you are generally in agreement with them. You can hide behind the fact that you didn’t personally hit ‘like,’ but it’s illogical to argue that you don’t condone hate speech or that type of discussion. I try to avoid being associated with the fringes, instead participating in places where people observe the decorum of racous debate and interaction without the need to resort to horrific name-calling and violence. I like crazy. Just not “angry crazy.”

It is evident that many people don’t have the “ticker” on the right-side of their FB – or if they do, they may not understand just how much it reveals. For the most part, if you hit ‘like,’ comment, post, share, or do any activity recorded by facebook, people can see what you are doing, what sites you are interacting with and click on these in real time, or scroll backwards in time and see what you’ve been up to. If you find me in the ticker, you’ll find that I’m clicking on a lot of liberal nonsense and posting zany commentary and pictures. I work to avoid jumping into the crazy pools of people spewing anger without any creativity or imagination. (I like when I’m insulted, for example, as long as whoever does it is creative and avoids clichés or boring methods.)

I’m having trouble reconciling the people I know with the hateful, angry, twisted activity that shows on facebook. People might be cautious about what they comment on or share, for example, but the ticker reveals a much different personality than that which they are concealing indirectly. I’m not stalking anyone, just observing and, over time, coming to conclusions.

It’s one thing to be a crazy liberal or conservative, but I don’t think it’s smart to be communicating your participation in hateful, angry content on social media. It’s certainly your right to do so, but please don’t be surprised when people start noticing a pattern of engagement.

I understand that you might hate Tom Cotton or Obama. Disagreement, even passionate disagreement, is a great thing. Poisoning your own views with violent language and crazy speech is only going to hurt you in the long run.

If you are hitting “like” or participating on the fringes of social media, FB is keeping track and in many cases, sharing your activity with others, even if you don’t realize it.

General, Technology

03252014 Privacy? Ha, Ha !

A week doesn’t pass when someone doesn’t seem shocked that much of their “privacy” is available either online or through the government. People who lock down their social media are no more protected than those who post everything publicly. But I can see that it is easier to believe that your privacy is protected. One of the most common errors I find, especially among the more educated, is foregoing Facebook or Twitter but relying on services such as LinkedIn. While Facebook can be locked down and used even jokingly, LinkedIn (as an example) contains your real information. Many users don’t think twice about exposing their résumé on such services, voluntarily, yet don’t feel exposed because it is a ‘better’ service than other social media. The same logic extends toward ALL professional associations and clubs. History teaches us that smart people tend to exploit their environment, too.

Do you own property? Chances are that your name, address, taxes, children’s school district, and even a floor map of your house are a couple of clicks away, online, via your local property records. Most searches allow you to use last name only or for multiple guesses. (The more unusual any of your names are, the more easily you are found. Worse still, these property listings are VERY likely to include your middle names, or legal versions of your name that are otherwise more difficult to ascertain casually) On top of that, if you click on deed links, you can see the full legal signatures of everyone involved. Sometimes, your banking institution is listed, as well as other information you wouldn’t expect to be publicly available, such as the location of your garage, where the doors and windows to your house are and whether you have a basement. Almost always, there is also a “map it” link on the property, so anyone can click it and get a detailed map, including street view, of how exactly to get to your property.

1st Place to Look For Property Records in Arkansas  (Link…)
2nd Place to Look    (Link…)

If you own property, you are tacitly agreeing to forgo much of the illusion of privacy.

(Some lawn care services now simply look up your address to quote a price to maintain your lawn based on your lot size and layout, as they can use google street view and satellite imagery to see everything in and around your yard.)

-Marriage licenses? Public.
-Almost all divorce proceedings? Public.
-Voter Registration information? Public.
-If you sue or get sued, chances are all of it is public, including all the motions and filings.
-A lot of people’s job applications are public (even if you don’t get the job!)
-If you’ve ever been charged with a crime, much less convicted, that information is out there for basically anyone to find.
-If you own a business, your business license, incorporation papers and anything similar is a matter of public record.

Want to check your own voter registration (or that of someone else?) Watch what information pops up…  Check Your Voter Registration Information Here                  (This can be a useful link, regardless of privacy, as you can look over candidate information and sample ballots.) But for anyone who can just GUESS your birthday, they can find you without any real effort. You might think you are safer listing only your day and month of birth in multiple places, but it’s an easy guess as to what year you were born, based on schools and other data.

If you know where someone went to school, many yearbooks are available online, for free. If you don’t mind paying for the information, your options expand exponentially. School pictures are in the public domain and are basically impossible to stop from being disseminated. Using Google or DuckDuckGo search engines unveils another universe of photos. Even if you aren’t sharing on Facebook, chances are that your picture has appeared many times in newspapers, LinkedIn, professional newsletters, etc. Databases usually don’t forget you, regardless of the amount of time that has passed. If you learn to use search engines creatively, you are guaranteed to find pictures of anyone. If you don’t mind physically searching at libraries, courthouses and newspapers, you can access anything. We all have pictures of us floating around in real and cyberspace. Worrying about it is no longer meaningful. If you factor in how many times you’ve been filmed or photographed passively by CCTV or surveillance, the probability of you being identified using facial recognition software is 100%.

I’ve known a few people who have public and professional jobs who think their information is safe. “Safe” is a relative word in today’s world. Much of the information being collected is a result of our own tax dollars being used to create ever-increasing databases of information. Your specialized job doesn’t insulate you from exposure to the crazy world. I have yet to find anyone immune from the limelight of information exposure, no matter how careful they think they are being. Regardless of what any government agency collects, each of us is daily doing our part to add information to our database, whether we do so willingly or not.

Even using the most basic functions on Intelius, Zabasearch, PeopleFinder, Pipl or any other common search option yields a lot of information about people – all without paying. Examples sometimes include your age, address, places you’ve lived, professional associations, schools, etc. If you are willing to pay, the amount of information you have available increases considerably. Using the free services usually yields enough background information to confirm your search and to develop leads originating from the confirmed information.

If you make more money or enjoy a better professional standing, your exposure increases, as you are very likely to have been pictured and mentioned in a dozen different formats. Anyone with professional affiliations such as police, real estate, lawyers, or teachers is almost guaranteed to be found without fuss. (The very people who would be most likely to fuss about privacy are also the most likely to have their particulars splattered all over cyberspace and realspace. You are noteworthy and if it’s being noted, it is being saved for later.)

As for social media, it is amazing how many tools are out there to analyze the who, what, when and where of what you say on Facebook and Twitter, among other services. No matter what your privacy settings, listen to that little voice in your head telling you it is all floating around out there anyway. That little voice is correct. No matter how careful you are, at some point the certainly of all information eventually being exposed becomes unavoidable. Even if companies share just your metadata, the algorithms which monitor everything already “know” you. People who aren’t on Facebook, for example, are still identified. Facebook has a huge repository of information that connects you to family and friends. It “knows” who you are – even if you’ve never had an account. It knows what you look like, then and now. People think I’m making that part up, but it’s true.There are geniuses who can subvert any privacy settings on social media and get past the protocols for privacy.

In many places, once you put your trash on the curb, it is available for anyone to pick up and take. Yes, that includes your five years of tax papers, bank statements, personal letters – all of which you knew you should have shredded, but didn’t.

Since I starting doing genealogy, I have been constantly astonished about what is out there in cyberspace – much of it listed willingly by real people. Having access to some of it has allowed me to genuinely help people. I’ve been able to locate people’s “lost” birth certificates, find their biological relatives, locate people who were once important to them, provide information that has allowed people to substantiate claims for grants and Native American registration and so forth. Some of it has been very rewarding. But the more I learn, the weirder that nagging feeling in the back of my head gets. It’s telling me that privacy is an illusion that we are trying to collectively believe in, despite all the evidence. I’ve found pictures of people who have erroneously claimed to have never been photographed and found information and pictures of those who do jobs that require secrecy. Many times, some of this information that should be protected vigorously is offered by local, state, and federal agencies without consideration for content or identification. (As an example, investigators who have been recognized or rewarded or even been in the news for heroic acts.)

If you aren’t checking at least one of your major credit reports yearly, you are inviting misery into your lives. A copy can be obtained freely from all 3 major credit bureaus. Even if they aren’t a total solution, getting yours should be the minimum, every year. If you aren’t doing it, you might as well be writing your social security number on the wall at the bus station.

As far as I know, I’ve never broken any laws regarding privacy, nor have I used any paid services, even legal ones, much less illegal ones, to obtain information. (Employing a private investigator, for example, is legal and opens up virtually any avenue of inquiry you would want to pursue.) I’ve found that for almost all inquiries, enough is out there already to eliminate the need for complex searching.

And such is our plight – in a world of information overload, each of our lives is spilled out across the world in little pieces, waiting for the wrong crazy puzzle-solver to pick them up. Hiding in seclusion isn’t the answer as it ignores the fact that horse if already galloping out of the barn.

Lifehacker Link To Delete Oneself From the Internet…
It won’t “really” work unless you devote a lot of time to it!

 

Technology

05052014 Aliens !

Playing the game of “what if” for a moment. What is one of my most-anticipated things to see happen outside of my personal life?

Aliens. Seriously. Not the redneck anal-probe-in-the-deep-woods aliens, but bona fide aliens.

Whether through undeniable communications or appearance, I would love to live long enough to to know that alien life capable of communication exists. I don’t have to see them, just evidence of their existence, communications, etc.

Not just because every aspect of our society would be called into question, not to add novelty to our lives, not to render pointless much of politics, economy, education or beliefs…

But to know that we have been living in a fishbowl of isolation, letting our narrow, horrible ideas slowly poison us. Knowing that we aren’t alone, even if we are still unable to directly communicate, will transform everything about our culture and planet. It’s time for something to shake us out of our isolationist stupidity.

I think confirmation of alien life would be the single best thing to happen to humanity since… humanity. Our illusions of self-importance would vanish. Maybe it would cause a ripple of destructive effects here. Maybe not.

Originally, I had included Fermi, Sagan and other people’s views and arguments in this blog post. I edited all that content out as it detracts from the optimism.

I’m fairly certain that we will soon have alien contact. It is going to be interesting, watching the unexpected consequences ripple across our world’s cultures, economies, and religions.

P.S. I’m not referring to the kind of aliens portrayed on the “History Channel” or late-night sci-fi television.  

Education, Technology

Find A Property Owner’s Address Or Find Out Who Owns a House

Washington Count Arkansas Public Assessor Link for Property
 AR County Data Site

This isn’t just a way to snoop. Your government thinks this is useful information to have available. The lawn service I used goes to public records for all clients to properly size the lots it services for mowing and leaf removal. Do you have a troublesome neighbor but don’t know how to contact the landlord? Do you want to know how your house compares to your immediate neighbors? Lost someone’s address? Do you want to know how your tax value compares? What school district a house is in? There are all sorts of legitimate uses for this type of site.

The above link if for Washington County, Arkansas, but most places have a similar and free method to look up anyone who owns property. In most states, you can also have visit just about any courthouse and look up someone’s information.  Using the above link, by putting in first and last name only, once you get search results, just click on the “more info” button. You get a diagram of the house, a map, all the tax information and much more. You can also look up any address, too, so if you want to know all the information about an address, who owns it, how much it cost, whether it has central heat and air, you can simply look it up.

Using the top menu and the “real property” tab, you can choose a different county, too.

If you aren’t sure if your place of residence provides this type of information for free, then call your local assessor’s office or tax collector and ask if real estate information is provided online. It almost always is.

I’m constantly startled by the number of people who aren’t aware that they have no privacy when it comes to the information about their houses. It’s almost ALL public. Unless you are using a business to conceal your ownership or some other intervening method, your information is out there. Whether you are a politician, a prison security guard or just enjoy your privacy, you really don’t have much in this regard.

Zillow.com and Trulia.com are also great real estate sources.

General, Technology

Facebook Never Shows You Eating a Cold Hotdog Over the Sink

If you are going to write about the “fancy pants” places you visit, I expect to be as frequently notified when you are eating day-old macaroni and cheese over the sink. Or that fact that you sometimes find a plain bologna and cheese sandwich to be as good as any steak. Or that you sometimes just want the plain version of the fancy cuisine you are paying for.

Studies continue to demonstrate that FBers use the service to “edit” their lives. We all know that to be common sense. However, please don’t perpetuate the mostly untrue idea that you are out experiencing a better assortment of good eating than most of your friends.

I want to know how much time you spend eating the equivalent of cold hot dogs straight out of the package.  : )

Organization, Technology

Never Ask For Lost Phone Numbers Again

For whatever reason, I was around several people this week who lost their phones, had to reset them, or otherwise suffered from a lost of data with their phone.

While sometimes surprises happen, there is no great reason to ever be left without all your contact phone numbers, pictures, or videos from your phone. I can throw my phone into the lake without worrying about “losing” my important information. I might lose a very few recent pictures, but anytime I take a “keeper,” I back it up at the next opportunity.

If you use Gmail and input your contact info through gmail contacts, then link them on your phone, everything will always be updated, available from anywhere, and never lost. It will even load the picture you put into gmail into your phone. If you have a couple of hundred contacts, you shouldn’t use the excuse of “it takes too long” to input them into gmail, as you won’t notice you’ve lost all that time later when you must attempt to beg, scrounge and find your treasured contacts once you have lost your phone or data.

I didn’t include a long, complicated explanation of how to do it in this post, as I’ve found that the best way to learn is to google it yourself. Even better – take advantage of someone smart at your particular phone store and ask them to walk you through it.  Using gmail for your contacts is such a time-saving, effective way to ensure you have your contact information backed up and always at hand. If you so choose, you can also input ALL of each person’s information, including addresses, birthdays, notes, etc.

I try to keep an excel file updated, too, with at least the important names, addresses, and phone numbers of the people in my life. The file can be accessed from anywhere with internet access. It is surprising how often I am out and about and someone asks for a mutual friend of family member’s information. It is at hand no matter what the circumstances. An excel file is ‘old school’ without a doubt, but I can’t convince myself to stop doing the extra step yet.

As for pictures or videos on your phone, each of us should be connecting our phone manually to a computer at regular intervals and using the drag-and-drop method to copy what is one our phone. There are also great tools to automate this for you, too. But for them to work, you have to use them.

I’ve written several times in the past about the need to backup our stuff. I know my advice is mostly forgotten or ignored.

 

Organization, Technology

Backup Commentary (Technology)

(Update 22 Oct 2013)

Don’t like to backup your computer or phone?


The good news is that you don’t have to. No one will come to your house and point a pistol at your head for choosing to not do it. (Although such a business would be an interesting one to pitch to investors!)

On the other hand, please don’t cry in anguish when your computer or phone crashes and you suddenly have lost all the pictures of your favorite cat wearing a kimono.

You should assume that your computer will crash. It’s mechanical and uses moving parts. It is going to crash if you use it long enough. The longer you use it without it failing sadly means that it is MORE likely to crash and burn without notice.

Assuming you have internet…. If you don’t have internet, stop reading now. Everyone has access to free email and backup services. Did you write an important paper? Send it to yourself as an attachment, archiving it in a folder to maximize your organization and minimize distractions and terrible loss later. Synchronize your browser bookmarks or back them up to your computer. Don’t have time to do this? Where will those 10 seconds be when you’ve lost the only copy?

There are TONS of free services on the internet for backup. Sure, you can pay for them, too. OneDrive, Dropbox, etc. You can save all your pictures, even if you have 5,000 of them. All in the cloud. Since you will be also making a local backup on another hard drive, on DVD, or flash drive, too, you aren’t tied to worrying about all the servers at Microsoft melting, nor are you concerned about your house catching fire and eating your computer and DVD backups.You can also arrange with a friend to copy all your cherished stuff and send it to his/her house and he or she can send their cherished stuff home with you, if you don’t want your stuff on the cloud, too. 

Even if you promise yourself to connect your phone once YEARLY and copy your pictures and music, this is better than losing all of your content. You can surely promise to copy it once a year, if not more often.

If you don’t know how to make cd/dvd/flash drive backups of your pictures, music, documents, and bookmarks – you are ALREADY DOOMED! Seriously. You don’t have to know how to change a tire to own a car, but you need to know how to deal with it in an emergency. Making backup copies of your data is considered to be the most basic, absolutely essential computer task.
The technology we use on smartphones and computers is ALWAYS going to be changing. You will learn one thing today and will never be able to relax. The way you do things will constantly change. There’s only 1 rational choice: learn as it changes. If you can’t or won’t, be prepared to not only pay other people for the service of maintenance or repair, but also steel yourself against the inevitable total loss of everything you have stored on your electronic devices.

Want to be self-sufficient? Learn to Google. Learn and study which sites give the best advice. Compare site’s instructions. Experiment with it. It’s how I learned. Waiting until you know how to do something is a waste of time. Figure it out when there’s no pressure. I’m not smarter – just more persistent.

If you are too busy to learn computer basics, then you can and should expect to pay for other people to bail you out of your troubles. If your car breaks down, you call a tow truck and mechanic – and you pay them. If you want to save $, you either buy a reliable car, maintain it better or accept the need to be severely inconvenienced when your car breaks down. Your computer is the same.The difference is that a tire is just a tire, whereas a computer or phone might contain priceless or one-of-a-kind memories. I can easily think of a dozen people who have lost everything on their phones or computers. Several of them were quite literally ill thinking about what they had lost.

If you CHOOSE to NOT learn certain computer skills and how to backup data, please make arrangements for the time when your machine fails and/or you have lost the term paper that is due tomorrow. It is going to happen to everyone eventually. 

Best Buy taught me this harsh lesson, after I thought I already knew it. They “fixed” me out of a ton of music and pictures. I had to pay them for the privilege of breaking my computer. Even though the issue went all the way to the manager and then to corporate, I was put on the “hell list” of customers. Honestly, though, I cost Best buy way more business than they caused me in anguish. I got a valuable lesson out of it and I made it my mission to ensure that they lost a lot of business for a couple of years.


Examples:
If I take pictures I wish to keep, I transfer them from the camera card to my computer. I then transfer the exact same copy to my wife’s computer. Then, I upload full-sized copies to my OneDrive account, automatically. (I don’t have to do anything – they copy without any other effort on my part.) At the end of each year, I make a new archive onto a usb stick. Even though I preach this constantly, even I have been known to delay uploading or backing up – and twice it has cost me considerable effort to attempt to reconstruct that which I’ve lost or misplaced.

Once weekly, I do an automatic 100% backup of my entire C drive to another drive. If the drive fails, I can have it restored in 20 minutes – entirely. I could do it daily, but I found it to be too redundant and beyond what I need.

I use dropbox as well, which is a nice redundant way to ensure I’m not peeling an empty banana. My important stuff is being saved somewhere, without my needing to manually find it, copy it, store it, etc. (The banana quote comes courtesy of Steve Martin.)

As for my music, I keep most of it archives on dual-layer DVDs. I’m not as concerned about it, as it is replaceable. My wife has an exact copy on her hard drive. If the house burns, I am screwed, as all my backups are local. I could keep a backup at someone else’s house, but I have weighed the cons and decided it’s not a priority. I can replace it all. It’s my personal selection of the ‘best’ music, but it’s not something that can’t be 100% replaced.

This is not the case with pictures, documents, and personalized stuff.

Regarding smartphones and regular dumbdialers (like I have): I get annoyed when I see or hear people say ‘my phone broke’ or ‘I lost my phone/sim card.’  Even if all you do is go to your favorite phone store and ask someone how to keep everything protected for the day when you either lose your phone or it breaks. It is going to happen to everyone.


Backup your data. It’s a learned habit.

In case I wasn’t specific enough: if you have data on a computer or smartphone, it will eventually get lost when the device fails, breaks, gets lost, stolen, drowned in water, etc.

Have a plan and least try to stick with it.