E-shop packages tend to be off-the-peg website add-ons.

They are set to mine as much data as possible. This is intended for mail shots, analysis and selling on. Sometimes they even sell to spammers who have no more right to live on God's clean Earth than a weasel.

It isn't necessary, it isn't right but it's the world we have.

My favourite hate is the *demand to provide a telephone number, if you ignore it, red flags light up. Alternative? some systems are happy with a ".", others count the digits, so all they get is the 0*** followed by 000000.

If you do provide a number they print it on the address label for all to see and mine is Ex Dir, so they do not get one!!

The good thing about giving a phone number is you may be lucky to get a text that will say your item will be delivered between x and y times which is usually a 1hr slot, beats staying in all day.

Also I have had the odd call from the courier who could not find the place of delivery or get an answer particulary if I'm getting items delivered direct to site and may not hear them if in a far off part of the house or outbuilding or have power tools running.

J

Jason,

My landline does not work with texts!!

K

Only when it is switched on

I actually agree with all that has been said above about the continual nosiness of firms of all sorts and have taken some steps to avoid some of them.

If you are using Yahoo, including the BT version for now, it is possible to set up a system whereby you have one email address, say "thisisme" and you then follow it with a dash "-" and then whatever you want, you can set up a specific email address per person or company, or whatever. The address looks something like this: [email protected]. As far as Yahoo is concerned, there is only one email address, [email protected], however all the addons get forwarded to that address so in effect you can have up to 200 (or 500, I forget which) separate addresses. What this means is that if you don't want to be bothered with a particular firm, then after you've given them this address and received your goods, then you can simply delete the "thisisyou" part. Hence they can no longer get to you. The downside is that you have to set it up individually before you logon to the particular firm.

Unfortunately for BT Yahoo users, you (and me) are to be migrated away from BT Yahoo so although it works as long as you are on BT Yahoo, it, apparently, won't work afterwards. Of course, there is no reason why you shouldn't set up a Yahoo account specifically for this purpose.

I understand that a similar system applies elsewhere.

For what its worth, the BT email system allows you to have a main account, and up to 10 secondary accounts. These secondary accounts can easily be deleted and created, although once a name has been created and deleted, that's it, it cannot be reused. This could be another way of defeating them, eg set up a secondary account "idonotwantyou1", then when it is deleted, the next one could "idonotwantyou2" etc.

Another idea is to program your email system, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, to recognise the firms name or something to do with the firm and then automatically delete it. I did this for all those emails advertising viagra, cialis etc and managed to get rid of most of them. Of course, you have to be able to set it to catch all the variations they use, eg viagra, v1agra, etc.

Another trick with 'phone numbers is to deliberately miss out a number somewhere, preferably one of the last four digits to avoid causing unnecessary problems for other innocent people. As the UK system still has mixed length numbers, any catch-all system for this must accept variable length numbers.

Hope this helps.

Peter G. Shaw

I have several strategies:

1 – always shop with the same email account, so any spam generated will always go to eth same place.

2 -be religious about marking unwanted emails as spam and blocking the sender.

3 – use a simple procedure that can't be guessed by others to generate your site password that looks like gibberish but doesn't require you to remember it. You might need a fallback procedure for sites that don't let you use symbols.

4 – make sure your email provider spam settings are set to suit your needs.

My mytimemedia email is pretty well know, but I get almost no spam – what I do get are usually genuine offers from chinese engineering firms who think I might be a customer. My gmail gets all the 'dearest Stub, I have $40,000,000' but I just click junk and it disappears.

Neil

REGISTRATION: I agree to a certain level that one should be able to shop anonymously. On the other hand, there are various reasons for registration based around security issues. As a seller, we want to know who we are dealing with. For example: When you buy through our website, we only obtain an authorisation to collect specified amounts. We have security software in place which checks every authorisation. In addition, once the order comes into our system, we have a certain level of history for every customer. If we have had bad dealings with the person in the past, we can and may refuse to accept the order and 'abort' the payment authorisation.

Other examples relate to 'potentially fraudulant' orders, orders from Russian courier companies operating in Peterborough, Portsmouth and Southampton, who keep changing postcodes in specified areas because they know we will not supply to third party courier companies. There are some readers on here who have even had phone calls from us to verify identity or confirm that 'it is really' them who have placed the order, because even though the account is in U.K., the fraud screening payment software shows the I.P location of the computer from which the order was placed is in China!…There are valid reasons for such orders being placed from elsewhere, but where ever possible, we have to practise due diligence, regardless of order value.

There are many other examples of security reasons for registration.

One of the other reasons is this: A customer calls to say: 'I purchased xyz from you and I need assistance with it/claim. I don't know when I bought it. I do not have a receipt'.

Or usually from companies 'our credit card statement shows that we purchased abc worth X, and we have not got an invoice for it'….their engineers usually throw the invoice which was sent with the goods into the bin, rather than give it to their accounts department.

If you live outside U.K. Mainland, the registration process allows our system to calculate correct shipping costs to overseas destination.

So, in ARCs case, there are many reasons why you can only buy on-line after registration. Yes I agree that there are counter arguments and answers to all of the above, but this is just the way we operate. I also know that there are many loop holes.

MAIL SPAM AFTER REGISTRATION: At the time of registration, ARC registration process asks customer if they want to get newsletters. If the customer doesn't want it, they do not fill in the request. If they want it, they fill in the request. When they get such emails, they can 'unsubscribe' at any time.

NON PROVISION OF TELEPHONE/MOBILE NUMBERS: In this day and age, speed of delivery is becoming more important. If ARC or its courier service provider has a query (if sent by courier), we need to communicate fast with the customer if certain queries/situations arise. In ARCs case, if there is no telephone/mobile number, we avoid processing the order, unless authorised – mainly by me. YES – our loss, and YES I know there is email

In all above situations, ARC does not sell the customers information to anyone. YES, couriers have customers numbers on the courier waybill/receipt, and this is there for logistical reasons. In ARCs case, where mobile numbers are provided, the customer receives text messages from the courier company and/or an email if any email address is given. Most of the time, we have found that this has been very helpful for all concerned, to reduce non-delivery issues in the U.K.. It would be great if certain courier drivers could read the receipt, and call the number in case they are unable to deliver…but then again, that is another story.

So Jesse, I hope you comprendo…even if you disagree with what I have said.

Ketan at ARC.

Edited By Ketan Swali on 11/05/2015 20:17:50

That's something of an over-simplification.

Cookie policy or not, a website cannot "plant almost anything they want" if the person concerned uses the security features of his browser properly. Back in the day, one could simply configure the browser to block all cookies (as well as scripts, java etc) if he was of that mindset and that would fix the problem. The odd site would work a bit funny but you could live with that.

Then the website creators got inventive. They deliberately incorporated cookies (and scripts) left right and centre without which the website wouldn't work at all. Not that those cookies are strictly "necessary to make the website function correctly" per se – but they have been made necessary in that particular implementation. By doing this so ubiquitously, they have essentially forced users to forgo the protection that their browser offers if they want to visit almost anywhere on the web at all.

And lets not even get started on the demon Flash Player.