If you get a spare hour in front of a computer between now and May 26, this RTE documentary about Chuck Feeney is well worth watching. I rarely last more than 5 minutes watching video on a monitor, but this held my attention the entire way through. An incredible man.
An open letter to Tesco and the Financial Regulator.
CC: Financial Regulator, Dublin 2
CC: Tesco Ireland, Gresham House, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin
CC: Tesco Customer Service, PO Box 73, Baird Avenue, Dundee DD1 9NF
CC: Tesco Card Center, PO Box 5747, Southendon-Sea, SS 11 9AJ
RE: Tesco Credit Card Security Procedures
Sir/Madam,
I would like to file a formal complaint about Tesco Personal Finance security procedures for contacting customers by telephone. I have been contacted twice by their staff in recent weeks, and I was shocked by their call procedures in both cases.
The first time I was contacted, via a private number, the staff member wouldn’t introduce themselves or who they represent “for security reasonsâ€. They then proceeded to ask me for personal information to authenticate myself to them. When I explained that there was absolutely no way I was going to authenticate myself to someone that is unwilling to authenticate themselves, they cited the Data Protection Act as justification. I hung up.
At this point I guessed it was Tesco Personal Finance that was contacting me, but there’s no way I could have been sure of this until it was confirmed by the second caller a week later, who at least had the courtesy to introduce themselves and the company. However they also asked me to authenticate myself, which I again refused to do. When I complained about the procedures they didn’t attempt to resolve the situation in any way, they simply cited chapter and verse back at me.
I understand why Tesco was trying to contact me; I received a letter about an overdue amount on my account and sent a cheque to bring it in order on the 31st of March. I accept that was my error and apologise to Tesco for the inconvenience, although in my defence I would add that I changed banks recently and simply had no way to pay the outstanding amount, as my previous account was closed automatically by my old bank before the new account was fully open.
I would also add that if Tesco had invested in just one Irish staff member to handle payments locally, or had invested in an online account management tool for Tesco credit cards, I would have been aware of the issue earlier and they would have received the payment already. I understand the service is outsourced, but Tesco can’t afford 50 or 100k for these simple features?
That’s neither here nor there though, my issue is with the security procedures. While I understand the need for these procedures, their implementation in this case is incompetent at best and dangerous at worst. Consumers are told every single day via various sources not to respond to hoax emails or phone calls, not to give authentications details to just anyone, yet here is Tesco ringing me out of the blue, on a private number, asking for my date of birth and mother’s maiden name.
Please change these procedures to protect Tesco customers, and the customers of other financial institutions whose senses may be dulled by these nonsensical security procedures. A security professional could and should be contacted to discuss the best way to go about it, but even someone like me with the most basic interest in security can suggest something better:
You can even automate this part of the procedure because no actual conversation will take place; not a bad idea in my opinion given the inability of Tesco’s staff to work off-script. Again though, I’m not a security expert, and one should be consulted. I’d strongly suggest Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Systems as one of the most respected experts in the industry.
But of course you should do your own research into this and not take my word for it, since I could be anybody; in much the same way that I don’t take the word of someone that rings me out of the blue. Seeing a pattern here? Please, do something about this idiocy. It’s dangerous.
This is an open letter, the full content will be published on my website at the following address:
http://verbo.se/tesco-credit-card-security/
All recipients are welcome to respond there or by email to [REMOVED] instead of in writing. If you would prefer that your response remain private, please make this clear in same. I reserve the right to post a summary of responses on my website.
Yours sincerely,
Adam Beecher
I don’t envy my sister in London, having to deal with the social problems this kind of idiocy propogates. The people responsible for commissioning and approving this should be forced to read 1984 a hundred times, Brazil style.
(Click for bigger.)
Via Boing Boing.
Didn’t really fancy the one on the Blackout Ireland site, so I made one of my own for Foot.ie. a few size variants below.
If you haven’t been paying attention, this is happening in protest against Eircom’s capitulation to the Irish Recorded Music Association attempts to censor the Irish Internet. You can read more about the subject here.
I’m not big on mainstream education. I’m almost entirely self-educated when it comes to the subject I love, however I do wonder sometimes if I would have fared better if I had the patience and energy for mainstream education. I tried it again recently in CIT as an experiment and found that I still don’t have those attributes, but that just proves that I can’t (or won’t), not that it wouldn’t make me a different person if I could.
While my own laziness is much to blame for this, I still feel teachers have a lot to answer for. I’ve had some superb teachers – Peter O’Brien in Douglas Comm probably taking first place – but most have been decidely average, and many utterly useless. My commerce and early science teachers in that same school, for example, were so boring I’m utterly amazed anyone remembers anything they say, ever. And if anything, the standard of education is getting worse in this country, not better.
I think I’d be a very different person and we’d all be a lot better off if we had people like this educating us, and our children.
Although I wonder if we’d ever want to leave school…
Great article on New Scientist with some answers to questions I’m sure many of us modern folk wonder about on a regular basis. Are hybrids really more of a fashion statement right now? Should I be leaving the lights on or switching them off and on? What can and can’t I recycle? Is washing clothes at 30 degrees ok? Et cetera.
Some of the answers are surprising – shipping receycling to China isn’t always bad, for example – others are obvious, but I reckon there’s something here for everyone. Even if you knew most of it already, it’s probably nice to have it validated by New Scientist. :)
One answer I’m not so sure about: Is it really still bad to charge electronics early and often? I used to be very careful to fully deplete my batteries to avoid the dreaded memory problem, but I read somewhere recently that this no longer applies with modern batteries. In fact I got the impression that the opposite is true, that I should be charging whenever I can. Does anyone have a definitive answer on this?
BBC News: We have painted and branded a BBC container and bolted on a GPS transmitter so you can follow its progress all year round as it criss-crosses the globe. The Box will hopefully reach the US, Asia, the Middle East , Europe and Africa and when it does BBC correspondents will be there to report on who’s producing goods and who’s consuming them.
Well, I didn’t know! Via Wired.
Is my word of the day. Basically it’s a phrase in which the last bit makes you reframe the first bit. The examples on the Wikipedia page are brilliant, and of course feature the master of the genre, Groucho Marx: