Privacy Madness
Okay, we’re facing a Privacy Madness situation here, I’m going to have a whinge and I am going to complain, there is nothing else for it. Our big tech and our governments are currently way off the mark in protecting us from essentially ourselves, or as they might like to put it nefarious purposes.
What’s my grip, twice today I have had to complete procedures to verify my own credentials for products and services that I have already verified before. DVLA and Facebook. In the DVLA I was notified by email of a new Direct Debit mandate for a vehicle that shortly will no longer exist.
I am not sure why my monthly direct debit needed a new Mandate for them to take the money, but there was no method of cancelling the procedure within the documentation I was sent.
Result, I headed over to the all-encompassing gov.uk – the single website that incorporated all our government’s services under one roof. Yes – all or most of the services are there, but having to set up yet another account to deal with Road Tax (which isn’t actually called Road Tax anymore) seems the opposite of the intentions.
I was led down a route that suggested I already had an account on the system, which makes sense as I have a direct debit and a mandate, but somewhere my correction to the system noticed I did not have a Vehicle Tax account on DVLA – so there was no other option but to set one up.
Once set up, i had to set about proving that I owned my own car and had a passport and driver’s licence. And it does beggar belief because now I seem to be sanctioned by the government that I do indeed have these things. I would never have known.
So what is my Grip – well I usually only tax a vehicle once a year, but the rate of technology change is obviously faster than that and it seems every year that I tax a car the tech has moved on to a point where anything I set up last year is defunct and out of date this year. Boom, start again.
Only let’s go further – let’s ask more questions, I did not realise you needed a passport to drive a car or to link your driving licence to your proof of ownership of a car etc.
I find myself passing more and more of my information onto more and more of their databases. My understanding of the whole GDPR argument is that we had more control over what information we gave out, except none of this was voluntary and you can see the project manager behind all this asking what do I have to hide?
Of course, once you supply a single piece of information to any entity, it’s out there and ready for hacking. The electoral commission was hacked in October 2022 and it only came out in July 2023 that we should ‘take care’ and ‘watch out’ in case our data is being misused. And please do not get me started on the whole ID-to-vote situation.
The truth is with the DVLA, I could have called myself anything, uploaded anything and I’d have a record of it. Worse I could have done it all in someone else’s name whose car I had just stolen while they were on holiday in France, assuming I had their handbags and passports as well… which is not beyond the realms of possibility.
My second issue is with Facebook… suddenly a fully verified business I represent was sent an email saying their domain name was no longer verified because it no longer worked. And since the client’s website was fully operational at the time surprised me. Result, restart the verification process, the domain name was OK, but now I have to supply business certification, vat returns and a whole lot of other data that quite possibly Facebook should never be given information about.
World gone mad. Privacy gone mad.
I will finish this rant on the note of Cookies – that other Privacy Nonsensical piece of weirdness that I simply no longer understand. Cookies are being phased out, by default iPhones and Browsers like Brave and Edge do not allow Cookies by default. So what’s the point of the Cookie Acceptance message?
I get that 99% of normal people have no idea what a Cookie in this context is, let alone understand what they do or how they work. So why present them with a system that required them to Accept or deny Cookies as they browse a website when they have absolutely no idea if their requests are being met? If I deny the use of cookies on www.bt.com – how can I tell they are respecting my wishes? Technically, no website is allowed to set any Cookie on a website without my consent first, that really happens and I wouldn’t know if it did or didn’t, at least not without checking every website I visited first.
Can we really trust any of these companies to respect even the smallest request and then check if they are doing it at all?
Usually, I like to offer some advice on the topics I write about, but here I am stumped… so much depends on your devices, your own personal views, the tech you use, the websites you are visiting and so on. Really there are so many different considerations at play here, it’s impossible to begin.
So, how about this… we stop bothering with the Cookie Bar altogether, on the new website made by NCompass this will always be the client’s choice, but what value does or doesn’t the Cookie Bar give to any small business website?
I’ll go further and suggest as website developers we have very set any cookies for any reason whatsoever, period. We employ plenty of 3rd party website cookies, such as Google Analytics, but we have never tried to track a user via Google Analytics, actually what good would it do anyone if we did? Literally the only use of Cookies I can think of that we would approve of is within eCommerce websites where we are trying to keep track of a Shopping cart for example, but that is hardly an invasion of privacy.
I’ll finish this rant, we have to find ways to give less of our information away online, there is no reason for any Tech Giant to need our passport, no reason why any government cannot join up its ‘services’ so that it knows who we are individually.
I’ll probably write again on this topic, but equally, I hope to see less privacy madness in the not-to-distant future as we cannot really go on like this.