Respect My Privacy…Yeah, Right

I’m so totally sick of Privacy Policies from credit card companies, phone companies, etc that mean nothing with regards to my private information. They all give us the tag phrase, “we respect your privacy…”, but they don’t. They make it a pain in the ass to prevent your information from being used in ways you’ll never understand AND what bothers me is that the default is to ALLOW your private information to be used at their discretion, unless you jump through hoops to prevent it. Even then, it’s not really clear what you are preventing.

Why don’t they make your information completely UNshareable by default, unless I explicitly state that you want it to be shared? That would imply that your privacy IS respected, but, of course, then they can’t make money selling your information and they can’t fill your inbox/mailbox full of crap offers.

This really makes me sick. How much time (beyond blogging) is wasted going through junk mail, spam, etc, that could have been prevented had your information been kept private? We recently got a mortgage and now all the freakin’ lists I went out of my way to be removed from, I’m right back on and I get all the garbage I tried so hard to prevent. I get more crap in my mailbox than ever before. Funny enough, my stupid town even allows junk mail at PO Boxes, so I get TWO copies of everything.

Voter’s Registration is another culprit.  I recently moved and had to update my address.  I asked if my information could be suppressed from mailing lists and they said they had NO way of suppressing names.  The woman I spoke with also added that they make a lot of money selling the list, so it actually HELPS the county.  Thanks, a-holes.

I also love how your mortgage info becomes public record.  Once you sign those papers, expect a FLOOD of junk mail with all your personal financial info relating to your loan.  Some of the letters I’ve received are cleverly disguised and appear very much like they’re coming from the lender.  I can’t imagine if I were in my 60′s and having to differentiate these junk offers from real letters from my lender.

I don’t know.  I know we live in the information age, but it seems that someone, somewhere can put a stop to this.  I’m all for a universal BAN on junk mail, just like we’ve been trying to do with spam.  If we eliminated all the unwanted catalogs and junk mail from out mailboxes, the post office would be much more efficient, we’d eliminate many lawsuits from fraudulent claims and we’d help put a stop to Identity theft.  Of course this will never happen in my lifetime, but someday it may happen.

Now let me get back to that HUGE pile of unopened mail on my desk.

 

I knew I shouldn't have given my REAL name! And... That's MR. Addkjl to you.