Privacy Digest

Round and About : A Loss of privacy, shantanudutta blogs on sulekha, blogs, shantanudutta blog from india: "I recently got a mailer from my bank in a nice sleek envelope. Inside it was an invitation. An interesting kind of invitation. It invited me to register my phone for the 'Do not call' option to guard against tele marketing calls, which the mailer said was a 'facility' being extended by my bank. The letter explicitly said that only the phone that I registered on the form would be inoculated against attacks from tele marketers; any other phone that I might possess could be and possibly would be used by the Bank to offer their products , almost none of which I would ever use.

However I am amazed at the vocabulary of the mailer I received which assumes that intrusion into my private space is the bank's right and my personal privacy is a privilege. In normal parlance it is like saying that kicking the door open and walking into my home is the norm and if I actually want some one to ring the bell and then wait for me to answer it , then I should fill up forms and let people know. When you put it this away, one can only be aghast at the low levels of sensitivity that we have in society today and the courtesy breach that has occurred along the way. One could be in funeral or lying on a sick bed or be in some other difficult situation and there is a brash, uncouth voice on the phone selling you some pre approved loan or an offer to transfer your credit card balance. These kinds of callers seem to take no cognizance of the fact that a typical client if he needed any of their products, would not be sitting and waiting passively for some phone call, they would walk over to the bank and obtain information in far more exhaustive detail than a phone call can provide."

(Read Original Article - Via shantanudutta blogs on sulekha, blogs, shantanudutta blog from india.)