TECH TALK
Emotional Intelligence to the Rescue
By Tak Sato
Tak, your friendly old geek, isn’t jockeying to become your shrink. My wife will tell you that I need a shrink; I shouldn’t impersonate one. Yet I wonder, does emotional intelligence (EI), also known as emotional quotient (EQ), have a place in the Tech Talk with Tak column? Absolutely.
To be on the same page, let’s first define EI. I typed the keywords ‘emotional intelligence’ into Google’s Chrome web browser, which, as an aside, was supercharged with Google’s AI assistant Gemini last year. The new AI overview section, ahead of the list of pages of relevant website links, summarizes EI as the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as those of others.
I’ll take a quick detour to review the other web browser + AI assistant pairings. If your preferred browser to access the internet is Microsoft’s Edge instead of Chrome, the AI assistant will be Microsoft’s Copilot. If you use Firefox from Mozilla Foundation, Orbit is your AI assistant. Finally, if you are an Apple loyalist, the trusted virtual assistant Siri was recently infused with Apple Intelligence (clever branding by Apple since the acronym is AI) to work with the Safari web browser that exists only for Apple devices.
The internet (the cloud) bombards us with information, both true and fake news, through our always-connected devices. Information comes from everywhere… online news outlets, social media, entertainment websites and more. We’re drinking from a firehose.
User Beware
I want to focus on phishing emails and text messages (smishing), both of which have nefarious intent. The perpetrators use emails, text messages or phone calls to con you into giving up information that can lead to loss of your money, or worse, your identity.
If you recall, the definition of EI we googled at the beginning ends with, “…as well as those of others.” Phishers and smishers try to heighten your emotions so you impulsively answer the call-to-action they provide. They hope that their threatening or promising message—basically, a lie and synonymous with the worm crucified on the fishing hook (bait)—will elicit an emotional reaction such as fear, anger, embarrassment or joy from you. Without self-regulating your emotions, you may be inclined to respond, which is usually a button or a link to click/tap, or a toll-free telephone number to call. Don’t take the bait.
For example, a smishing message I received recently stated that I was out of cloud storage space. If I didn’t click/tap on the link, which was this message’s call-to-action, to subscribe to more cloud storage space within the next 24 hours, I would lose all my data. The smisher hoped their message would trigger fear in me, from the prospect of losing all my priceless family digital pictures stored in the cloud.
Instead of letting fear dictate my next move, a wiser course of action would be to check my cloud storage app, or the Storage item in my Settings app, to check how much storage space I have left. There are other ways to discern a phishing or smishing attempt, for example, by confirming the identity of the sender. By giving in to fear, I could have given away my credit card/debit card number, expiration date and CVV (security) code to a fake website or scammer on the other end of the phone line or email exchange.
There are thousands of message variations that try to provoke different emotions in you, but with the same goal: to make you perform the call-to-action. Try to recognize message patterns and, most importantly, never respond to their requests. Let your emotional intelligence be a step ahead of the scammer’s emotional intelligence.
