Public privacy and Big Brother (the state not the programme!)

[WideWebWitch]

Anyone read the section in The Grauniad today about Big Brother and privacy? I hate the idea that because I bought nappies 5 years ago companies are now targetting me with pre-school stuff...I resisted getting a loyalty card for ages for this reason but eventually gave in to get the odd £2 off my shopping. I'm so cheap Is anyone else worried by this? I know it's not exactly stunning news but it makes me tempted to make all future purchases with cash and to cut up my loyalty cards. If only I didn't need the credit...

If anyone's interested the articles are here

[Lucy123]

The articles are very interesting, www, but I kind of think that cutting up cards etc is a bit extreme. Too much CCTV does annoy me, but I can see the need for it (as an idealistic/rebellios teenager I and some friends hatched a plan to take down all of the cameras in Kings Lynn, but went off the idea after another aquaintance said "great, looting!" .

What really really annoys me is junk email - I always tick the "no mail" box and am generally careful about who I give my email address to, and yet I keep receiving mail telling me I "opted in". I ignore most of it, but if ever I try to "unsubscribe" I tend to get more (suggesting someone guessed my address in the first place and used the unsubscribe to confirm I exist. Dp always writes rude emails to the perpetrators, but now gets at least three quite disgusting pornographic emails a day. That's what I think of as real intrusion anyway - at least "open now, great offer" type envelopes can simply be thrown in the bin.

BTW I'm pro IDcard - we have them in Spain and frankly they're handy - no 15 forms of ID and a letter from your mum to open a bank account or rent a house. The Spanish always ask how the police get the names of people comitting crimes in public - I say, well, they ask. They think this is hilarious.

[Twink]

The mailing preference service (& its phone equivalent) made a big difference to the amount of junk we receive.
Ages ago Dh started only using cash instead of debit & credit cards and now never gets any financial type junk so the bit in the section about tracking credit card transactions rings true with us.
One thing to be careful of is if you order stuff by phone to always tell them you don't want your details passing on, in the same way as you always tick the little box on forms - if you don't do that it is taken as an acceptance that you're happy for them to pass your details to any 'carefully screened company which might provide products & services of interest to you' (or should that read highest bidder ??)

[emsiewill]

We use 192.com a lot where I work, and I've always thought that it could be used for quite sinister means. I heard a colleague calling someone's neighbour once, as the person they were trying to contact was not responding to letters, and their number was ex-directory. Personally, I would never go that far, as it seems a real breach of both parties' privacy.

[Marina]

Didn't see the articles but have the same reservations about personal privacy as many others here. I am particularly sensitive about this right now as I had just recently bought a few maternity togs on the internet and this week I received a slew of unsolicited and rather upsetting babyware catalogues.
This year I was delighted to see that my LB is offering all electoral roll members the chance to opt out of the version that they are obliged to make available for direct marketing. So we ticked the boxes. And we do find being ex-directory means we get little cold-calling at home.

[janh]

I was a bit surprised about 192.com, had no idea it was so easy to find out stuff like that about people.

Most of the rest of it was no surprise really. I like to do my bit for the disinformation side by filling in those "shoppers surveys" with ludicrous information - childish but satisfying.

Marina, how awful for you to receive all that stuff. My daughter works at a credit-card-insurance call centre, one of the cards concerned is Mothercare, she recently rang a woman who has a Mothercare account and the woman told her no, she wouldn't be needing insurance because she'd had a miscarriage; DD couldn't apologise enough for bothering her and she was v nice about it, thankfully. These systems are just too big and inhuman to allow for circumstances like yours and hers. This is the downside of the ubiquitous all-knowing computer systems. No going back now, either, unless as WWW suggests we all go to cash (and then we would have no credit records and never be able to borrow anything.)

Lucy, I am pro ID cards too, don't understand how anybody except crooks and anarchists can object.

[Rosy]

I read the articles, but to be honest I couldn't get that excited about much of it. This is partly because I don't have a mobile or a loyalty card, and always tick the box about not using my details when I fill in a form. Also, I'm not really bothered about people knowing what I spend my money on, if that's what they wanted to do. Having said that, identity cards - noooo! Not that I think there's any danger of them being introduced in the UK, as it's a very un-British thing IMO. (I never had any problem carrying my passport around when I lived in France.) I don't think that I should have to prove who I am when walking down the road, minding my own business, the onus is on the police (or whoever) to make a case for detaining me. Hope this makes sense!