"I'm afraid I can't discuss the order with you sir, I would have to talk to Mrs...."
I'd called Aldi, To let them know they've not sent a battery/charger with the cordless mower.
Bureaucracy has gone too far hasn't it?
Bought / ordered in her name?
Was it supposed to be in the same box or comes 'extra' OOI (just interested to know how it got excluded if it was supposed to be in the box). Or maybe it was an extra combo?
I guess if you were asking for the results of her medical tests or something that might be considered 'private' or even likely to be a gift, you can see why they might need to interpret the rules 'strongly' but a customer service enquiry on a battery mower ... ;-(
So I guess the question of 'is it bureaucracy gone mad' may be down to if there is any granularity in 'the rules' and if the Aldi rep applied them correctly or not?
Cheers, T i m
I know, why aren't there as many people working on making the rules sensible and workable as there are making many of them effing pointless.
Yeah, I said... Mate, she's down two flights of stairs and probably busy with a customer, can you not simply check that what i'm telling you is correct and if so just send *her* a battery?
Apparently not. More than his job's worth, eh?
GDPR serves a very useful purpose, there is a genuine need for such legislation but it was a poorly drafted in a number of ways and is widely misunderstood and abused, often used as an excuse for officiousness and intransigence. The UK government should have adapted the EU regulations to make them more sensible, but it didn't. I wonder why not?
Strictly for instance if you are in business in any way, a gardener, say and you have an address list on your phone (who doesn't) you need to have a statement of compliance and policy somewhere (on paper?). A pointless and intimidating bit of red tape. If your address book is paper - doesn't apply.
You should however be pleased that the EU looks out for its citizens and protects their data from abuse by big business.
TW
yes, it does - and has been the case for a great many years - since well before GDPR.
I get the problem from my doctor who wants more and more info from me on the phone tpo prove who I actually am. One day a patient will expire while trying to satisfy them they are the real patient. Brian
What makes Aldi think the person on the phone is not "Mrs" ? A very dodgy assumption to make these days if they dont want fall foul of their probable Diversity policy.
It occurred to me to pretend I was she.
I thought that an address list with no other information doesn't require anyything further. It's only if there is other information with the addresses that you have to do more.
The problem comes when the Mrs then rips a strip off them and makes a complaint to the data protection regulator because "you discussed my personal business with that psychotic scamming SoB that I am divorcing, because of his controlling behavoiour!"[1]
[1] Not suggesting that is the case here of course, but you can see that making assumptions that all is cordial and cosy between two people just because they share a surname is not always a safe assumption.
Presumably because we were legally required to faithfully implement it into UK law. (they usually don't care if you gold plate it, but get upset if you leave bits out or actually try to make it work as intended!)
GDPR applies to any data that is "processed" - it does not limit to stuff that is held electronically.
In the UK, everything is legal except that which is forbidden by law. On the continent, with their fundamentally different approach, the reverse is true. So, the EU might pass a Directive saying "You may use red-coloured tiles on your house". Nothing more is needed in continental countries because all other colours would be automatically forbidden. Translated as-is into UK law, such a Directive would be a no-op because it wouldn't forbid anything. So the law that actually would be passed here would need to include an *addition*, stating explicitly that all other colours were forbidden. Some people then call that gold-plating, when in fact it is necessary in order to implement the actual purpose of the Directive.
Since I don't know what the actual purpose of GDPR was, it's hard to know whether its implementation into UK law was done well or not. Or whether the EU's original offfering was good/bad/indifferent or not, or self-contradictory, unclear, or vague, or not.
It's f****ng irritating, I know that. Every damn website I go to bores me with shit relating to cookies. Since I have no intention of allowing-all, I have to interact with each of these, what a waste of time. In addition I sometimes find that I'm on one page of a website, deal with the cookie s**te, then go to another page which is part of the same organisation, only to find that they want to bore me too. Or there's the BBC, which even if I answer their question, decide a week or two later to ask it again.
At the time the UK implemented GDPR, we were still in the EU so had no option to "adapt the EU regulations to make them more sensible", as you wittily put it. Of course, now we're out, it might be possible to do something.
The intersting point about GDPR was that the concept originated in the UK. I went to a seminar taken by one of the people who produced the legislation.
"I identify as Mrs X..."
We had a major problem with an insurance company applying details of an accident to the wrong part. It was resolved, only to pop up at the next renewal when another company accused my wife of not declaring an accident of mine.
We made a total of £500 in compensation out of that.
<Snip>
Even worse are the ones that take you to a different page to reject cookies and then don't take you back to the page that you were trying to look at.
Browsers have long had a "Send Do Not Track Request" option - I wish the sites would just read it and not require me to opt out ... repeatedly!
Just found one tonight trying to catch me out. For a long time, when clicking Manage Options, sites have presented me with a list of items, pre-marked No, Off or whatever and an Accept All and Save Selected button. Just a few minutes ago, I accidentally clicked on a link to the Radio Times and all the options defaulted to On - on going back they are now defaulting to Off.
:-)
I think Matalan are still convinced that I am Mrs Rumin or something similar!
We certainly had the data protection act long before GDPR...
This is Brexit bullshit, many times debunked and ridiculed. You still believe it. Ha Ha!
TW
I have the same problem with Long Tall Sally (or I did before their recent troubles), because I have bought presents for SWMBO from there. They assumed that all their customers were female.
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