Your Personal Information in 2011

At my latest job I do surveys over the phone, which is not a difficult or even interesting job but is in line with what I want to be doing, which is research. Aside from the horrible drone of dialing phone numbers over and over and filling answering machines all over the country with a pre scripted message, the hardest part of the job is dealing with the constant rejection of people who do not want to do surveys.

I can't say I blame them, I've got plenty of phone solicitations and have turned down "surveyors" that seem like thinly veiled sales pitches. But these are legitimate surveys being run by branches of the BC government with the intention of improving the programs and infrastructure, something you would think most people would want to do to make the society we live in better. I usually try to find out why people aren't interested in doing surveys, usually people say "I'm busy" which isn't true since anyone can accommodate 10 minutes in to their schedule one time no matter how busy they may actually be. But it is difficult to argue it and that is why they use it. And even though I appreciate on some level when someone actually tells you they don't want to do the survey, as opposed to never answering the phone, hanging up on you, or just getting angry and then hanging up on you, the rejection itself is very difficult to get over, the problem being that both the surveyor and the person answering the phone have the tendency to take the interaction personally, sometimes extremely so.

For the last survey I was working on, just before the "break" for Christmas (people don't like doing surveys on their holidays for some strange reason) I was working on what seemed like a very useful survey for an aspect of infrastructure for the local municipality (I won't get in to any more detail about it just because I don't want to violate any confidentiality). What I found particularly surprising about this study was that when I mentioned the organization I was calling on behalf of, a lot of people got really really upset when I mentioned the name...apparently they have a bad reputation with some of the population, whereas other people were absolutely fine or even eager to help us out with their information.

Still other people stated that they didn't feel comfortable giving personal information over the phone. This is definitely understandable if they are unsure of who is contacting them, but this particular study is done every 5 years and sent out brochures to everyone that would be contacted to let them know the survey was legit. Still, even with this information people didn't want to give out private, personal information about themselves.

This would make sense to me, except on later reflection I realized that they are probably giving up much much more information to other places and are so naive as to not even realize it is happening. The biggest example of this is debit cards and credit cards. Almost everyone I know uses them because it is "easier" than cash...and these are people who are very concerned with their own privacy, and probably wouldn't have done the survey I was doing over the phone either for the same reasons. Just a heads up, THE BANKS ARE COLLECTING ALL YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A PURCHASE, WHERE and WHEN you do it. Your spending information is much more valuable than most of the questions I ask on a typical survey, and unlike a snapshot they are accumulating your spending patterns over your entire lifetime. And unlike us, who are bound by the ethics surrounding legitimate research surveys to keep your data confidential and only use it for the purpose related to the survey, the banks have no regulations as to who they can sell that information to.

Much more blatant examples of this are "club" cards such as Shoppers Optimum, Air Miles and Safeway cards. Every transaction where you input the card tells them what you bought, where and when you bought it, and it goes in to a database along side all your purchases from every other day. And while that information may be horded by them, there is nothing stopping them from selling that information to any marketing company willing to buy that data. They are doing this constantly, and YOU ARE GIVING THEM THAT INFORMATION FOR FREE.

Of course we tend to have a head-in-the-sand society who can't see long term consequences of what is going on and if they can avoid thinking about something that isn't right in front of their faces they will do it. It's like participating in the Stanley Cup riot smashing property while 100 people point their cameras at you taking pictures and video. Hmm no that will never be used against you in the future.

If you are against giving out personal information, that's fine, I totally understand where you're coming from, but just 1) think about all aspects of your life and see if you are really practicing what you preach, or are you just doing whatever happens to be easiest at the time; and 2) if you don't want to participate in what people may be asking of you (in person or over the phone) just remember the person you are dealing with is just that, a real person with feelings and other human traits, and treating them that way only takes about 10 extra seconds of effort.