pumpkinstrokemarrow

Some people get upset about the UK government acquiring access to everybodys' email. Now yesterday I sent an email containing, say, some obscure surveying terms. By the time I sent the thing, Google had put up a one line banner advertisement for a product very closely tied to said surveying terms. Now I can quite accept that an email carrier has to have the right to see the email. It has - at least unless we get in rather deep - to be able to do this in order to be able to maintain the service. But writing a program to read emails in order to target advertisements is going rather further - although one might well be happy about this if the targetting is accurate and the advertisement is muted - which they are. I suppose one is less happy about the government doing much the same thing - they might even buy the necessary technology from Google - because one suspects that they will use it for the purposes of collecting tax. And while we have a duty to pay tax, we should also have a right of privacy. It is not fair if when I am discussing my negotiating position vis-a-vis the tax people with my accountant via email, the tax people have access to those emails. Not sure that I will get too excited yet though. I think that all that is going to happen is that some very large government computer is going to spend lots of time sorting through trillions of rubbishy emails looking for key words like 'bomb'. I think they will have enough to do with that, without looking for key words like 'tax man'. No doubt in time this last will be possible, and if I was younger I might worry - but I'm not!

While we are on privacy just had an interesting interchange with my listening bank (HSBC). Phoned up by a lady with what sounds like a US accent from what she described as the collections department. An account is in debit to the tune of a couple of thousand or so. What am I going to do about it? She kept banging on about this last without offering me any explanation of why the account was in debit (which I would have thought would have been quite obvious if she had taken a look at the account's recent history) and without letting me go and check the account to find out for myself. Not interested in assurances that the matter would be sorted out instanter with our local branch. In the end I was reduced - I am sorry to say - to rudeness, shortly after which I put the phone down.

Then go online and find out in about 60 seconds that what is happened that a cheque for a couple of thousand pounds was drawn on the wrong account, but honoured, leaving the account in debit to most of the amount. Nip into the right account, transfer the necessary funds to the wrong account, where they should arrive on Monday. Go down to the local branch, clutching the offending cheque book, to explain what has happened and what I have done about it. Oh no sir. Can't talk to you about this because you are neither account holder nor signatory. But can't you just note the account with what I have done. I am not asking you to do anything to or with the account. No sir. But it should be OK because the collections people won't bother you again before Monday and they won't bother you at all if the money gets there first. Not at all impressed with all this. More or less doing away with branches might have saved a lot of money - which was a good thing - but the quality of service in this particular matter was clearly a bad thing.

Maybe on Monday I shall trundle down to the bank again, armed with my power of attorney (which it did not cross my mind to take today), and find out how long it will take to unblock BH's bank card. Will the power of attorney empower them to talk to me? Will our credit rating be sullied for ever?

I wonder if all this accounts for the slight glitch I had a few days ago with my own bank card, connected to another account to which BH is a signatory. That is to say, the HSBC hole in the wall at Vauxhall tube station told me that a withdrawal transaction was not valid with this card. Spent the journey to Kings Cross wondering whether someone has been tampering with that account. Go to the HSBC hole in the wall outside Kings Cross station and the folding stuff is forthcoming without comment. Or maybe I am getting paranoid; maybe on the first occasion I just hit my account at the same time as some routine background operation had locked it for a few seconds.