Annoying Your Customers

Perhaps I am just being overly sensitive to this.

I have noticed that there is a prevalence of late for website sign-up forms to ask for not only the usual information such as a user name, but the ever ubiquitous and completely useless date of birth and now, this week, your gender!

And it isn’t just optional either, it is mandatory.

You will have a gender, damn it!

Yahoo! Mail, Google, Skype, SightSpeed, Windows Live, and at least two popular social bookmarking sites and a Firefox plug-in all have a mandatory “gender” field.

Why do you need to know my gender?

For marketing purposes?

I don’t want to be marketed to.

For sales analysis by your staff?

That benefits you, not me.

So you can uniquely identify me?

Choose something else.

My personal details are my own to reveal not yours to own.

I find being forced to reveal gender, sexual orientation, date of birth, or most other details about me, involuntarily, is an annoyance and offensive.

And I am not the only one I am sure.

The information I divulge is entirely up to me, not you.

Requiring name, date of birth, or gender does only two things: it annoys your customers off, ensuring they won’t be giving you their business, and if they do go to all the trouble of informing you of this information, you now have a polluted database because they just signed up with completely false details showing that they are a female Doctor/Baroness/Sir born on January 1st 1901 who loves the movie “Go fuck yourself!”* whose first pet was called “And your dog!”

I love telling people in customer support at my bank that one when they ask for my secret pass phrase so that they can “verify my identity.”

Customer Support: “And to whom am I talking to right now?”

Me: “Justin Lloyd. The account holder.”

Customer Support: “You’re a man.”

Me: “You are very observant.”

Customer Support: “Can you verify your date of birth for me?”

Me: “Yes, January 1st, 1901.” (or whatever earliest date that their dumb computer system will take)

Customer Support: “And can you answer the question, What is your favourite movie?”

Me: “Go fuck yourself!”

*pregnant pause*

Customer Support: “And how may I help you today Baroness Justin Lloyd?”

The moral of the story is, if you are in business and in the habit of collecting data to benefit you, you’re an idiot and your data is worthless.

* Actually I use an equally interesting, equally childish but completely different “favourite movie” now.