Scooters have returned to Minneapolis. Should you be glad? Sure. In a way, the scooters seem like a symbol of the Before Times, when everything was breezy and fun and magic: Walk up to the scooter, get out your phone, wave it, and voilà!
Wrong app! See, this is a Boid, and you have the app for the Flyt, or something. So you download the app — through the air! Like magic! And then enter your credit card information, which you hope won't be hacked, and your driver's license, which will be stored in a database with the password "passw0rd," and then you can unlock the thing and head off on your merry way.
Six months later, you get an e-mail about a data breach, and a year later someone takes out a mortgage in your name. It's like being 8 years old and getting a visit from Interpol:
"Son, have you been committing wire fraud in Greece?"
"Uh ... no?" The man explains that someone has cloned your identity, and they suspect a data breach. But how?
"Have you ridden the 25-cent bucking horse ride outside of the Ben Franklin? We think that's where they're getting their data."
As with most things these days, we surrender all our info for a fleeting moment of excitement, and the scooters certainly provide that.
At first you feel quite vulnerable and fragile in traffic, like a newborn baby in a bison herd. After about two minutes, you think, "Oh, I got this," and you crank it up and go as fast as you can. You feel cool! Surely you look cool!
