It’s Cyber Monday, Y'all!

Cyber Monday credit card security

It’s Cyber Monday, Y'all! Do you know where your credit card is? Of course, you do. It’s in your wallet, or purse, or poised on your keyboard, ready to be put into service. I should have asked do you know where your credit card number is? 

In 2017, according to the National Retail Federation, 81 million people in the U.S. shopped online on Cyber Monday.  About 15 million more than on Black Friday. The only way to snatch up on those cyber deals is to pay with a credit card. And pay we did. Business Insider reported that we spent six and a half billion dollars in 2017. Over $1.5 billion than on Black Friday that same year.

We’ve become trained to look for https or the little padlock to indicate we are dealing with a secure site. And that is true for the transaction. E-commerce is mostly protected by encrypted communications. The security issue here is saving your personal and financial data on the company’s website. Creditcards.com posted a story in 2017 in which they conducted a poll of credit card users. The poll found that 94 million Americans store their card information online

There may be encryption for the transaction but when you store your data you’re giving the site all the information a cyber thief needs. That data sits in a database on the company’s servers for who knows how long. See a previous post on this blog about Cleaning Up Your Online Presence. 

Storing your card information makes it much easier to check out but also exposes your data to hacking. Think about all the stories in the news this year alone about companies getting hacked. And if not directly then through third party vendors. It’s so common that we almost stop paying attention to the reports. If we do feel we’ve been affected, we change our password and move on. It’s become so a part of our lives we’ve become complacent about e-commerce and our privacy.

Tips

·     You have to use plastic to shop online. When you do use credit instead of debit. 

·     Best not to store your information, especially if it’s a little used site or one-time purchase. Type your card in each time. Don’t create accounts. Check out as a guest.

·     Research with whom you’re shopping. The bigger the company the better, to some extent. As opposed to smaller businesses that have less traffic and do not have the resources to support update to date and effective security. 

·     Considering having a card you use specifically for online shopping with a low limit

·     Monitor your accounts. Especially after a shopping spree or big shopping day like Cyber Monday.

Not trying to be Chicken Little. Just trying to remind people to take a beat and check their online shopping practices. Coming back from identity theft or online fraud is not an easy path.

Even though it’s not credit card related here’s another tip that could help protect your card. If you‘re shopping Amazon or looking at reviews on Yelp or TripAdvisor, run the link to the product through a review analytics site like Fakespot. 

The results will give you an idea about how reliable the seller is and if it a reliable company. If using Fakespot, after you find a product on Amazon copy the link from the search bar and past into Fakespot. The results will be a grade regarding the site and advisement on whether you should proceed or not.

Please feel free to share. Visit the blog archive for more posts about Privacy. https://mazzellainvestigations.blogspot.com/search/label/privacy

How AI affects finding a job

AI hiring is making finding a job difficult

When my children were looking for jobs I so wanted to tell them to print a bunch of resumes and go door to door. That was five plus years ago and the old ways of applying for jobs had already changed. October 2018 had the news that Amazon was abandoning its use of AI (artificial intelligence) recruiting software. 

Watching my kids search I realized how hard it was to get yourself in front of a real person in order to sell yourself. Being at the end of a long career and not having had to look for a job in a long time, I felt for them in this new world. A majority of companies have online applications. Which saves a lot of time and effort as applicants can sit at home and get their resume to as many businesses and recruiting companies as they can. The problem then and now is knowing how to write your resume and complete the applications. Not that’s its any great discovery, but I long suspected that companies used algorithms to filter the resumes. If your application doesn’t hit the right marks it may never make it to a hiring manager.

AI Recruiting

In November 2018, Amazon admitted to having a secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias towards women. Reuters reported that Amazon had been developing software since 2014 that would review applications. The hiring tool would assign candidates scores of 1-5. Developers realized that the program “learned” by reviewing resume patterns over the last ten years. During that period a high number of resumes came from men. The models developed skewed towards assigning men higher scores. The system taught itself to rank lower the word “women” and downgrading women colleges.

Amazon tried to program in gender-neutral terms but eventually abandoned the project in 2017. Amazon officials told Reuters the program was an experiment to find a way to aid in recruitment of the best candidates. The AI program was never used in actual hiring. Reuters reported, however, that Amazon did not deny that recruiters reviewed the recommendations made by the program. 

The Reuters article cited a 2017 CareerBuilder survey of U.S. human resources managers finding that 55% would be using AI over the next five years.

Application tracking

Until AI is further developed, hiring managers will continue to use Application Tracking Software (ATS). Very simply, ATS reviews applications by word according to parameters set by the company. Back to my rather obvious suspicion online applications are filtered. If your resume doesn’t hit the right notes, your application goes nowhere. It’s also the reason applicants rarely hear back from companies after submitting a resume. It never reached a person who could reply with a polite, “Thank you, but no”.

A JobScan blog posted in 2016, The History of Applicant Tracking Systems credits the first ATS to Canadian Martin Ouellett who created an early form in 1996. Since that time ATS has been refined and developed. As of 2016, over 300 ATS are being used by 90% of companies.

You can definitely feel for people looking for jobs today. The market is tight and getting your resume in front of a real person is difficult. Knowing the playing field and learning the rules of job hunting is a job within itself. If not an education.

Please feel free to share this and any post. See the blog archive for more posts about Hiring.