The way I saw it: in a small town of a small country everyone can find out all they want about another person because there is always someone who has the information you seek. For example, if a new guy asks you on a date, all you need do is make a couple of inquiries and you'll have his complete dating history and first-hand accounts of his character - whether he is a cad or a decent fellow. In the States, you would have to pay an agency to provide that kind of information, and still not be sure that you are not getting entangled with a monster. In a big city, neighbors don't even know one another. That's privacy, I thought.
Fast forward a couple of decades and I realize I had it all wrong. As a government employee I have had to fill hundreds of official forms with questions probing so far back into my past that I could not answer them even when I was only in my 20s. For example: What did you eat for breakfast on March 12, 19-hundred-something? What was your great-grandmother's favorite color? Who was your maternal uncle's first girlfriend? All this before September 11. I'd hate to see job applications people have to fill out today.
OK, these are official matters and one can assume that the name of my elementary school teacher may hint at some important flaw in my upbringing. So the employer, especially the U.S. government, needs to know. But once you get home and you close the door to the outside world, you are in your sacred private domain. My home is my castle, right? Sure.
ConsumersUnion.org
One thing I have learned is that my telephone line - serviced by increasingly expensive Verizon - is not in my private domain. Almost 100% of the calls I receive on my landline are generated by telemarketers, campaigners, pollsters, fund-raisers and scammers. With the advent of cell phones, e-mail and social media, my friends and others I deal with very rarely call my home number, except to leave an occasional message - an appointment reminder and such.
Annoyance calls made by a human being are relatively easy to answer: "I am not interested, please don't call again." But increasingly, the calls are made by robots and if you answer, the robot frequently says: "All our agents are busy." If you put the phone down, the robot will call again, and again. You can't win in this game.
In the past few weeks, I've been plagued by a robot with an "urgent" message for Jared Hoke. The robot has been calling at different hours and is now waking me up at an earlier hour every morning in the hope of catching me. I am not able to explain that I am not hiding Jared in my closet because I can't talk to anyone or even leave a message. So I called Verizon's harassment hotline for help. A Verizon robot answered to explain that telemarketing robots make more calls than they can answer, so they put you on hold, and if you end the call before speaking to someone, they'll call again. The Verizon robot also said these calls are perfectly legal and that I can place my name and number on a do-not-call list, but without a guarantee that the calls will stop.
ConsumersUnion.org says:
Robocallers invade our homes and privacy. They circumvent the Do Not Call list. And they cost us real money – an estimated $350 million a year is lost to phone scams.
Yes, in addition to legit calls, there are criminal ones. I have been receiving calls announcing in a tough tone that the IRS has filed a suit against me. Even though I have my tax papers filed by an accounting company to make sure I never get in trouble with the IRS, I was fooled for a moment. I had to make a few phone calls to make sure I was in clear. But some people get fleeced.
According to FTC, there has been a significant increase in the number of illegal robocalls because "internet-powered phone systems have made it cheap and easy for scammers to make illegal calls from anywhere in the world, and to hide from law enforcement by displaying fake caller ID information."
Some scammers remain a little more personal. I still get calls from a real man from India or Pakistan, claiming that he is calling from my PC company because my computer is sending signals that it needs fixing. And fixing involves allowing him to access my computer and all the data in it. I told him never to call back, but he still checks on me at least once a month.
Verizon's suggestions? I can change my number to an unpublished one, or discontinue my landline service altogether. I have been reluctant to take an unpublished number because I always picture a friend from my European past passing through Washington and trying to find me. It has happened. So if I don't have a listed number, I risk missing an old friend. I know, I know - a friend does not come unannounced - but it is not quite like that where I come from.
Ultimately, I may have to do what many Americans have already done. Peggy from Park City, Utah, wrote this on ConsumerUnion.org:
"Before we gave up our landline, we used to get several (harassment calls) a day. Since giving up our landline, the calls have stopped, but I have received an “Award Notification” claiming they had been unable to reach us to deliver a voucher for more than $1200 in airline tickets. I recognized this as phony. As a 70-plus woman living in the mountains, it would have been nice to have kept the landline for emergencies, but I couldn’t get them to stop calling. I really wish someone could make them stop."
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| My mailbox |
I asked the mailman not to put ads and commercials in my box, but he told me he was obliged by law to deliver every single piece of junk with my address on it. So there we are. My home must remain open to the invasion of everyone trying to make a buck. My privacy is non-existent either in the personal or in the public domain. Companies know what I last bought and what I may be thinking of buying next. Everyone can find out anything they want about me online.
This kind of plague has not reached Europe yet, at least not to such an extent. Friends in Croatia tell me that once they close their doors, their homes remain impenetrable. No one would dare call during dinner time, or during siesta time. Telemarketing would cause a revolution; and robo-calls are unheard of - as yet.
Privacy? Maybe the Croatian language does not have a word for it, but who needs it when you have the real thing.
