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Well, the latest trend is that your email and mobile number are the inroads to your personal life which spammers love to exploit at their will. The Do-Not-Disturb (DND) facility offered by cell phone operators does not seem to be working. Even the recent court's directive that marketing agencies must use designated and easily identifiable numbers, is also not working. Spammers have reached everywhere - even facebook profiles are not spared ! I have tried every trick in the bag to keep them at bay but of little use. Some or the other sales agent is able to make a call through an ordinary looking number trying to sell some loan, credit card, training program and even stuff like pickles and chips !!
My friends tell me similar stories. Some have changed their numbers, some have changed operators but the problem remains. In facebook too you get lot of spam messages. These are mostly viruses. Once clicked, the harmless looking post gets transmitted to all your friends and moves with multiplied intensity.
But what is actually happening? There is an over-crowded market dumped with throngs of products and services. And yes, everyone wants to sell, and outperform competitors. And to do this, you need to reach customers. Email ids and mobile numbers seem to be most easily accessible pieces of data that we foolishly share at the drop of a hat.
Remember, the last time you visited a mall - and filled up a form dished out by an animated sales person promising travel discounts or free lucky gifts worth some 1000 bucks? Yeah! and you felt the offer was so harmless and you had nothing to lose as you did not have to pay a single dam? In the melee, you just scribble some details - your phone no, address and email?
Bang, you are gone !! You lost your digital identity. You just gave away your contact details which can be swindled mercilessly in the market to make those unwanted calls at unpleasant times !
But are these marketing agencies doing some homework before jumping the bell? I don't think so.
I get calls from my own bank to open an account. This bank is not a small-time bank but a leading bank in India and I have my account there for over 10 years now !!
I get calls from home loan providers when I have already taken one.
I get calls from a bank to buy a credit card when in fact I use the same bank's credit card and its been over a year now. And mark this, every time when I get a call, I tell the person to update their records and that I should not get a call again, but this has hardly been of any use. I have got more than 15 calls from the same bank (even the same department) in the last 5 months !!
Recently an insurance company, a sister organization of a leading mobile operator (whose services I am availing for over 3 years now), called me to buy an insurance policy. The sales executive sputtered some great benefits about the policy, while I wondered how on earth could this guy get my mobile number and be thinking that he can sell an insurance policy over phone? It took some time to fix the missing gaps. This mobile company was in fact transmitting its customer's (mobile users) details to its sister organizations !! It is an alarming trend.
Well, in India, privacy seems to be a far-fetched concept. You can ask for it but never get it !! And if you hammer hard, you are just making a fool of yourself.
And yes, you must have ordered (from home) a pizza or a burger from your favourite chain? The data that gets stored is supposed to help customers when placing the next order. I realised that this was also not leak-proof. The day I ordered for a pizza to be delivered to my home (and in return as is the usual practice, you give your mobile number to facilitate delivery), the very next week, I started getting more number of sms from food joints. I wondered why this food joint is parting with the most revered asset it has, i.e the customer database? I still have no clue as to how this can happen.
Later, when I started experimenting by giving my landline number while placing further orders from home, I realised that there is a pressing demand for giving away the mobile number. In one instance, the pizza guy was not ready to register my order if I do not give my mobile number !! Outrageous and strange, as I started understanding the spam routes into my life.
There's no great research needed to know about these issues but just a little awareness if you are concerned about your privacy. Else, who cares that we live in a spam world?
Personally, I do not have anything up against the sales pitch, but the shoddy manner in which it is currently being done by sales persons is something that irks me. Marketing and Selling have their own sacrosanct principles that sellers are ignoring gleefully. Instead of doing good homework before launching a campaign and showing respect to privacy issues, there is mad rush to capture markets and boost sales.
Unfortunately, this would do more harm than good.
