Protect My Account?!

All these different email accounts are asking me either for a secondary account, phone number or other personal information in order to prevent identity theft and account hacking.

I usually just ignore these request as I’m feeling like these are simply excuses of the whichever company trying to get more of my personal information. So I feel like they are exploiting me rather than protecting me.

The annoying thing is that they keep asking every time I log in. Can’t they just rmb that I want to skip this procedure and stop requesting?? As a result, there’s an extra click and page load to be done in order to get to my email. Maybe their logic is that if they bug me long enough, I may give in at some point. Very annoying.

And recently my credit card came up with this new program that ask us to allow them to track my purchases and they will tailor some sales and promotion for me and that I can get extra reward points with those purchase. To me, it’s just that they try to legitimize the fact that they are tracking my activity. I did sign up (well… technically it’s 詹占 who signed up cos we are sharing a credit card account). I suspect that they are already doing so anyway but now they just want an formal permission from me so there’ll be no argument in the future.

Also, in a lot of stores these days, when you go pay at the cashier, they asks us for our address and/or phone number and/or postal code. Is that necessary??? I read somewhere a little while ago that customers does not have the obligation to provide them with that kind of information. So I have stopped giving them my info.

Not that I think anyone is trying to do me any harm since I’m such a small potato in this wide world but I simply do not like the idea that I’m being ‘tracked’. Altho I’m sure if they want to track me, they can find a way anyway… I highly doubt that anything I do would actually makes any difference…