I had decided that I will not be checking email or using the internet during the vacation. And I was pretty fine with that. Except that we had no idea how to get to our hotel in Sedona from Vegas. So we went to the business center in the hotel and got the directions, but I also noticed that there was an internet access terminal.

I was tempted and so I used it. But what was unnerving was that as soon as I swiped my card, it did not read it and asked me to swipe another card. I swiped the same credit card again and it showed the rest of my information on the screen, like name and last 4 of my card! I was shocked. But now that I had gone ahead with the access, I had no option but to hope that it was because it read the name from the credit card strip :-(

Also, another shocking thing was that there was no way to clear cookies and crap, so when I went to gmail.com, it opened up the previous user’s gmail account! Goodness! I was so uncomfortable that I just randomly surfed around till the time was over and just crossed my fingers that none of my information was available to the next person.

Something’s gotta be done about standards for such devices that get installed at public places. Standards about security, about refreshing cache, cookies, etc. after logging out. I saw the flip side of such public internet terminals in India, with i-way chain of internet cybercafes which I used a bit in Gujarat. Those terminals were all well set up, where you could not do anything ‘administrative’ and also, the cache and cookies would get cleared at log out automatically, thereby avoiding all personal information from being stored.

About time these vendors woke up and get their act together.