I was invited to fill in an online survey for Morrison's today. It warns you to not enter any personal information. The first question asks for your age. It later asks how many children you have. Admittedly, there is no identifying personal information here, but surely Morrison's could link the invitation to the response?
Sorry, I should have put 'OT' in front of the Subject line.
A few years ago I filled in a survey for one of the big supermarkets and I used completely false information (except email) with a user name I had not used anywhere else.
I still get emails with this user name that are tied to scammers or fraudulent offers.
It's interesting to see how often a simple spelling mistake, such as an added 's' or 'e' to a name, comes up later from totally unexpected sources.
What form did the invitation take? Was it posted to your address? If it was, did you (voluntarily) provide your address previously?
I confess I started to complete the form but gave up after many unnecessarily intrusive questions.
It was posted to my e-mail address, using my Morrison's More Card as the link to me. Nothing suspicious there, I don't think. Usually, these messages contain the current offers in the shop. They have my address, from the original card application.
This form was much more inquisitive than what I expected, so I pulled out en route.
Every guy with root access to the main servers has a cousin in Mumbai...
That's fine, and your prerogative. It is possible that adjusting the preferences would have provided a satisfactory outcome. I like to provide feedback where there is an opportunity as I like to think my voice is being heard but I agree this should not be used as a marketing exercise in disguise.
I am not familiar with this form but are all the questions compulsory or can you leave fields blank? With the charities, I always decline to complete any question relating to mobile phone number. Very occasionally I have used the Ofcom list of fictitious numbers to allow me to complete a form.
I'm sorry I don't recall. Since I use an email address with a personal domain I'm reluctant to give away personal details for free and without any benefit.
Some of my colleagues get numerous calls to their mobile, thankfully I don't, despite many organisations now requiring it for two factor identification.
Surely if you have a 'personal domain' you can create an infinite number of working e-mail addresses that simply go nowhere. I certainly find it useful to have e-mail addresses on my domain that I just give to organisations that seem to me to be a bit dodgy. I also create addresses like 'chris.tesco@<my domain>' so I can immediately tell if that E-Mail address has escaped from 'tesco'.
I simply use a VOIP number which looks like a mobile number but forwards SMS messages to my (real) E-Mail address for 2FA.
I do use that feature quite a bit, and not many establishments give my email address away. The most notable are abbey@mydomain and allianceandleicester@mydomain Both show up at:
It was useful where I gave a unique address to Swintons and immediately got emails from "The trading floor" (or similar name). I would never have known the source otherwise.
Either way, my name is the domain, and so it inherently contains personal information, as well as, in this case, details of purchases at Morrisons.
I would like details. Where did you get the VOIP number? Is there a cost?
A and A, £1.25/month.
Many thanks for the info.
it seems this is the only reason feedback forms are supplied.
That, and the hope of getting some spark of brilliance that can be quoted in future advertising.
Many sites use an asterisk for mandatory questions, so a lot of what is in these forms can be left out. They are only doing it for market research. Brian
Its not a new thing. Back in the days of Tandy they used to fill in forms in the branch for special offer mail outs. These were very often good offers but like you after a while, there were other companies sending you their catalogues as well. This was before GDPR, and I'd guess that Tandy did sell mailing lists to other companies as well. I had one heck of a job with a footwear company I filled in a form for as somebody copied the spelling of our name incorrectly, so when I got the next set of offers, there were two of everything, one in the real name and one in the misspelled one. When I lost my sight, I tried to stop them both, but only the one stopped. It took me many calls to convince them the other one was in fact their error and that although that was not my name it still was me!
Brian
My mother had something like that happen with Readers Digest. Suddenly, the issuesd stopped arriving, so she sent a postcard which had her as Mrs (husband's initials). Nothing happened, so this time she sent a letter with her own initials - nothing happened. So my father wrote a solicitor's letter on behalf of his 'client' - Mrs Hope. Suddenly 3 copies arrived - one to each addressee!
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