Businesses hate you for your privacy safeguards (but they won't tell you)

Are you enjoying the red queen race of tech against tech? Or put differently, are you experiencing the battle of how to cling to the walls while Microsoft Office slowly but surely sinks into the abyss, divesting itself of features and functionalities you were beginning to depend on? And the use of commendable and recommended steps to protect yourself online being rewarded by new obstacles thrown at you by websites that suspect you of protecting yourself too much because you are up to no good?

I am partly talking about odd little annoyances, new peeves and delays, but also more fundamental issues. What happened to the ability to easily print out that hotel booking that you right clicked in Outlook to insert into a suitable spot in Onenote so it would be handy later? That’s right. Out of the dozen of options open to you, printing what is in a section of Onenote is no longer there. Gone for no real reason. I mean, surely you would rather export the whole notebook as a pdf, open it, scroll to page 81 and print out that and page 82, with the booking. Of course you would. No real reason the functionality went away and difficult to see in what way Microsoft benefits here.

More fundamentally, however, I worry about legitimate businesses taking counter steps to prevent customers from safeguarding their online privacy. If your parents travel and log on to airport WIFI or free public WIFI, you would sleep more soundly knowing that at least they were doing this through a VPN. This does not prevent all evil but it makes you that little bit less vulnerable to snooping. What it also does is make some reputable companies throw odd obstacles at you, like a couple of extra slow “confirm you are human” checks that probably attempt to check for cookies that you blocked - good on you - and after a while may decide that you are just a real customer who cares about online safety. The assumption that only criminals care about online safety and privacy is a black mark against such companies and I would look elsewhere to spend my cash. ..

‘ I worry about legitimate businesses taking counter steps to prevent customers from safeguarding their online privacy’

Another example I have come across is the credit contract protection that is available to residents in some countries including Denmark. Here you can flip an online switch on a government website and nobody can take out a loan or even a small credit such as a mobile phone service in your name unless you flip the switch again first. This is a fantastic system and all countries should have it. However, again this rests on the assumption that legitimate businesses will support consumers in taking the right steps to protect themselves against identity fraud. They do not. Or actually, if the credit block switch is set to protect then they will assume not that you are someone concerned about identity theft but that you are someone that has zero credit rating. Ah, I hear you say, when companies know how this work then all you have to do is put the switch back to permission in place before you contact them to say modify your mobile phone subscription to a larger package. Yes, well, actually they will tell you that not only was the permission set to deny but it was then switched to allow, which clearly suggests that for someone doing identity theft you are doing it expertly. My advice is to yes, absolutely do have the switch set to block contracts and only change that a week or so before you need to modify a mobile phone contract or, God forbid, take out a loan. By making life hard for careful consumers, businesses are pushing us towards being careless and abandoning online safeguards because why would they want to do business with savvy customers?

I could give more examples but I think I have made my point. Some companies have monopolies, especially credit card issuers in smaller countries. Having credit cards issued in several countries is a sensible safeguard in case some AI bot doesn’t like your travel patterns and decide to cancel all your Danish credit cards just to keep you safe on the road. However, if you have cards issued in several countries it stands to reason that you could be a cautious traveller but most likely you are up to no good so we won’t trade with you despite being the monopoly. However, usually you have a choice. If a service is reluctant to do business with customers who aren’t leaky with data or keen to take cookies from strange websites then absolutely go elsewhere. In fact, if there were websites that made a point of only selling to people with strong VPNs and privacy heavy browsers and encouraging single-use credit cards then yes, one would be duty bound to buy from them. Do you need to protect your data? Actually, not necessarily. A lot of stuff is fine in the open. Though try not to give away sufficient information to allow social engineering and identity theft. Display a bit of paranoia just in case. If you use reasonable online safeguards you can help bringing it home to businesses that they need to adapt their services to the reasonable online safety standards that customers will be using today.