The preoccupation with online safety has reached creepy dimensions. Hotmail has blocked my mailbox because it noticed that I was trying to access it from a Canadian IP. I had to conduct a series of bizarre transactions to prove who I am but it still isn’t working.
Yesterday my sister called Hydro Quebec to pay her bill. The company refused to accept the payment because my sister didn’t manage to prove who she was. Because obviously there are crowds of evildoers running around trying to pay somebody else’s bills.
In the meantime, actual safety is of little concern to anybody. There is so much snow that two-way streets have become one-way. But the drivers are still charging in both directions, and nobody seems very interested in regulating the traffic or cleaning the snow. This is Montréal, so it isn’t like snow in winter is a total surprise.
Clarissa's Blog 
If you have a company you are expected to take care of your customers as if they were small childs because the consumer is the king, therefore they’re not accountable. Safety obsession is just a result of that. If you don’t want to lose your company because of infantile suing assholes, you have to make a lot of restrictions and exclude a lot of people. My Yahoo account was also blocked when I changed countries, and it took 2 months to get it back. I understand them though. I would do exactly the same, as in the current social climate this is the only option if you don’t want to pay all of your income to lawyers and for penalties and fines.
LikeLike
I have to ring Halifax to let them know I’ll be escaping the Angry Island for a while, just so they won’t vapour lock my bank plastic …
My Internet phone service won’t let me administer my settings sometimes because I forget I’m connecting from somewhere that isn’t my “home country”, even if it actually is one of my home countries.
When I’m in the United States, it seems to work out that whatever I buy for a temporary SIM, it stops working immediately after I cross the border again.
Yes, Foucault said that societies are carceral, but this is just madness.
LikeLike
Identity thief and online security is like Cancer… You hear about it, you certainly know many people who have had it, or who have family or friends who had it.. So you feel it close to you, but somehow you manage to see it “just in the news” / “just around you” and somehow, you unconsciously think it couldn’t happen to you… Until it does. Then you realize the odds weren’t as low. My point with this is that those measures that you think are not needed, they are.
LikeLike