Sometimes I miss the days when I wrote on this–which was considered high tech.

I had a weird experience yesterday with Google that gave me the creeps. It started with helping my daughter with a mailing list. She asked if I would sign onto Google docs and we could work on a list together. I said I’d email it to her and she explained how much easier Google docs is to use. Instead of emailing one document back and forth, we could work on it together—at the same time.

She was asking for addresses of family and friends to mail her graduation announcements. I was amazed at how the document open in my Google window would fill in with names and addresses, without me doing a thing. My daughter explained that this is how all group projects are done for school in this day and age. That was truly amazing to me. We finished the list easily around 9 a.m. with only one document between the two of us. FYI, this is NOT what gave me the creeps.

It was the text I received from Google at 3:15 p.m. that was weird. It stated that someone had tried to log into my Google account with my password but Google had declined it. They asked me to go online and check if it was me or someone I knew.

I asked my daughter if she had tried to access my account and she said, “Nope, it wasn’t me.” I didn’t think about it again until this morning and realized that I had forgotten to check on my computer to see if someone had tried to access my Google account. This morning, I went back to Google docs, and there was a red banner across the top of the window asking if I had tried to log in yesterday at 3:15 p.m. I clicked no, and it took me to another page to show me a map of where the person was that entered my password. HO CHI MINH CITY! That’s right, someone from Vietnam has my password and tried to hack into my account. Is that creepy or what?

I watched Facebook’s Zuckerberg on TV the past two days being questioned by the Senate and House about privacy, tracking, advertising and censorship. I know all those things are important, but seriously, isn’t someone across the world using my password and log-in info worth some investigation, too? It makes me believe that we’re all much more vulnerable than what we think. I think it’s time to think about internet security and what we can do to protect ourselves. Needless to say, I spent time this morning changing passwords for online accounts.

One of our earlier Macs. We had one in Strawberry, too.

Has someone tried to log into one of your online accounts before and what did you do about it?