A case of mine, all mine

Mesmerised by technology, our standards have fallen

Until recently it was relatively easy and cheap to hire a car in SA. You’d hand over your driver’s licence, sign for the top-up insurance, initial a few squares of a one-page document, pick up your keys and off you’d go.

I’m not sure precisely when that all changed but by last week the easy chore had become irritating and tedious. I was forced to fill out seemingly pointless forms and listen to all manner of warnings.

My annoyance turned to anger when, a few days later, I received an invoice for R364 of which the actual car accounted for just R177. I had drifted into Ryanair territory, where a £9 flight ends up costing £65. The most offensive add-on was the R73 “contract fee”, which I presume is what they charged for extracting all that information from me.

Things took a darker turn over the weekend when I read Robert Shrimsley’s column in the Financial Times about the aggressive data mining done by companies these days. How much of my time had I been forced to spend giving the car-hire company personal information that was going to be mined for some other purpose?

At Naspers’s recent, very interesting AGM, CEO Bob van Dijk, in a bid to highlight just what a new and electronic world we are in, told those in attendance that the data created in the past 12 months was equivalent to all the data created in the rest of history. This is a chillingly absurd fact.

But it may help to explain why I constantly receive unwanted SMSES from the likes of Directaxis and other determined lenders or purveyors of junk. When will someone introduce an app that will allow you to charge for the receipt of an unwanted SMS or e-mail?

The easy ability to collect and mine electronically filed data is why mundane tasks — hiring a car, returning something to the store — have become a little more tedious for all of us. Data has become the holy grail for companies and politicians intent on selling us something, and no personal information is deemed too insignificant not to be collected.

Over the weekend my Luddite tendencies boiled over as I sighted a Google Maps car cruising through my area. The equipment on the roof of the car indicated it was filming and yet nobody seemed to be perturbed by this Stasi-like intrusion into their private lives. No doubt, we are only too happy to have reliable maps at the press of a button.

We seem to be so mesmerised by all that technology has to offer that we’ve lightly abandoned some rather quaint standards. It’s not just the privacy issue.

Consider how Uber’s substandard behaviour was tolerated before London authorities blew the whistle. Uber offers a potentially great service but, like some obnoxious spoilt brat, it seems to believe because it’s shaking up a staid market with new technology it doesn’t have to adhere to rules.

Perhaps the London authorities were under pressure from vested interests, but maybe it’s time we take a closer look at the presumed benefits of the data-mining electronic world.

My Luddite tendencies boiled over as I sighted a Google Maps car cruising through my area