Saturday, July 15, 2017

Businesses Misusing Required Private Information

It should be the law that if you are required to provide private information such as phone number, address etc. to a business that they cannot use that information without expressed written permission.

So if a financial institution requires a physical address due to the laws our politicians have passed they shouldn't be allowed to then use that to send you junk email, sell your name and address to others to send you junk mail, etc.. If they have a legal requirement to send you something, fine.

I had a large financial institution send junk mail and then refuse to not send junk mail without a phone call from me. I can buy and sell stocks online, I can send big amounts of money to and from the account online, but I can't stop them from misusing my private information without calling them.

Such institutions also call me to marketing various services (though usually there is some way to stop them doing so if you can figure out where they have hidden the process to stop them from misusing your private information). Again they should be required to separately collect private information for marketing efforts (or to sell it to others...).

It is unacceptable we are required to provide private information and then need to jump through hoops to not have it misused. They should have to request the information specifically for their own marketing and other purposes. They should not be able to misuse legally required private information. They should have to collect private information from you explicitly for such purposes.

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