Cutting down on technology
Charles de Gaulle, when he was president of France, was reported to have said, when he didn’t return or answer phone calls: “If I wanted to talk to him, I would have called him.”
I can see his point. In today’s constant overload of calls, scams, and advertising, trying to answer or even view all the information that is thrown at you is at best a harassing experience, with very few benefits. Some of these situations threaten that if you don’t respond, unauthorized charges will follow, or present an offer that looks too good to be true.
It probably is, and if you bite, the hook is going to pull money directly from your bank account.
Last night Vertis waved her iPad. “Look at this, Richard! This email says I have won a 52-inch TV at Walmart! All I have to do is send them $15 for shipping!”
She was laughing at the scam, but multiply that by 1,000, and you can get a feel for how technology overload is disrupting our lives. We know how to delete, but passing through all the junk on my email, Twitter, Facebook, and other Internet offers is mostly a waste of my time.
Occasionally a friend or business acquaintance will send me something of interest, but is it really worth the hassle of hundreds of emails just to get one morsel of worthwhile information? I guess it is, because the solution is worse than the problem.
Where do we go from here? It seems, as we see toddlers looking at their cell phones, that one day we’re going to have a crash of technology overload. The vast amount of worthless Internet offerings will be so overwhelming that the reverse will finally take place, and folks will stop online shopping because their daily email will have such a vast number of salutations as well as hundreds of scams.
It’s mandatory that when you order something online, you must give your email, and that automatically puts you on promotions lists to get hundreds of emails. The item you ordered is picked up by scanners, and lookalike offers add to the flood of emails.
Ordering online doesn’t require merely sharing your email, but something even worse: your credit card info. In our business office we have had to stop authorization on several credit card accounts. Some of them were hacks, but most of them were repeat charges. You order some face soap, and it comes in, and you are happy, but then in a few weeks another shipment comes in, and a few weeks after that another, and another, and another.
You complain that you didn’t authorize multiple shipments, but you are sometimes told that since you didn’t check some little box which said this was a single purchase, you were put on a once-a-month shipment program that’s charged to your credit card. So the one item you ordered keeps coming and coming and coming, and your credit card keeps getting charged again and again and again.
After going over several other business accounts, we determined we had too many questionable charges, and although they weren’t for large amounts, the cumulative dollars were significant. That’s when we suspended the credit card and ordered a completely new card.
After seeing a drop in unauthorized charges I’m going to regularly switch credit card numbers; it will be an inconvenience, but it seems that is the only way to stop further scamming.
I’ve found out by accident that receiving constant info about nearly everything isn’t worth the effort. I have had a stock retirement account at Merrill Lynch for a number of years, but after a hacking they suspended my Internet view of the account. After several attempts to correct the error, I gave up, and since this is a retirement account, a monthly statement is fine.
The same type of hacking error shut down my Facebook account, and after wasting several hours trying to re-authorize the account, I gave up, and I couldn’t care less. My Twitter bit the dust a few months back, and I’m not about to try Threads.
However, my email is valid, and I read and try to answer all emails that are about my column.
If you want to have the convenience of shopping on the Internet, you must be alert to scams, double charges, and outright bank account theft. I wish our stuck-in-mudslinging Congress would take up Internet scams and put some teeth into stopping it.
I’m not going to toss my cell phone. But I just canceled two more credit cards and ordered new ones.