My life is becoming dominated with user names and passwords, security questions and secret clues. It’s making me grumpy.
Just in the past two days I’ve redeemed airline miles, signed up for commercial-free radio, and bought some items online. Each of these transactions requires that I register on the site involved. This, in turn, means creating a user name and a password and also revealing my email address so that the company involved can email me a congratulatory note for joining their “family.”
The truth is I don’t want to register at a site to be able to purchase something from it. I don’t want the vendor to remember me and what I’ve bought in the past. (Amazon is famous for this.) And I don’t want unsolicited emails telling me about upcoming sales or reminding me that Mother’s Day is the next holiday for which I should be purchasing gifts.
Many of these emails do have an “unsubscribe” feature, which enables the user to opt out of any future communication. But this feature is frequently difficult to find and implement. It takes time too.
I also find it frustrating that when I revisit a site to make another purchase on a different day I must remember my user ID and password before proceeding. Maybe this is a way of tracking a customer’s loyalty or frequency of buying, but it strikes me as also making the process more difficult. I don’t always record that information; but, never fear, the site has a solution for this too. You click on “Forgot my password” and, Voila!, the invisible company resends it to you via your email, of course.
I’m thinking the old fashioned way of physically going to a store and paying cold cash for an item is the easiest. It’s the most anonymous too.
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