Category: Corporate Fuckery

Private & Personal

Corporate Fuckery, Numbers & Statistics, Surveillance Society

I’ve never been that interested in my origins to have done the 23andMe thing, so I’m personally not affected by this activity.  Nevertheless:

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have sued the genetic-testing company 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent.

The suit, filed on Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, argues that 23andMe needs to have permission from each and every customer before their data is potentially sold. The company had entered an agreement to sell itself and its assets in bankruptcy court.

The information for sale “comprises an unprecedented compilation of highly sensitive and immutable personal data of consumers,” according to the lawsuit.

The genetic data at stake is especially sensitive and should be protected, because if it is stolen or compromised, it cannot be replaced. The data can be used to track not only the individuals who sent the kits, but also people related to customers, including yet unborn generations.

Why, and who is the prospective purchaser of all this “highly sensitive and immutable personal data”, you ask?

[23andMe] is poised to be acquired by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals for $256 million, according to the lawsuit.  Regeneron is a biotechnology company that uses genetic data to develop new drugs.

So there’s no chance that the data will be abused in any way, then. [eyecross]

I think that my position on this kind of thing should be fairly obvious by now.

Your personal data — all of it — belongs to you, and to nobody else.  Only you can authorize its use or dissemination, for whatever reason.

So if some asshole organization — let’s just call them Regeneron, for brevity’s sake — wants to use personal (i.e. unaggregated) data, they should have to ask you personally for your permission, each and every time.  (Once data is aggregated, of course, your anonymity is no longer an issue.)

By the way, the same should apply to US Census data, but that particular bullet has gone through the church countless times already, and it’s a terrible precedent.  (Which is why I always urge people not to fill out the “long form” census questionnaire every time this bit of government snoopery comes around.)

About Damn Time

Corporate Fuckery, The Gun Thing

I see that CitiBank may have seen the light:

We will update our employee Code of Conduct and our customer-facing Global Financial Access Policy to clearly state that we do not discriminate on the basis of political affiliation in the same way we are clear that we do not discriminate on the basis of other traits such as race and religion. This will codify what we’ve long practiced, and we will continue to conduct trainings to ensure compliance.

We also will no longer have a specific policy as it relates to firearms. Our U.S. Commercial Firearms Policy was implemented in 2018 and pertained to sale of firearms by our retail clients and partners. The policy was intended to promote the adoption of best sales practices as prudent risk management and didn’t address the manufacturing of firearms. Many retailers have been following these best practices, and we hope communities and lawmakers will continue to seek out ways to prevent the tragic consequences of gun violence.

Yeah, whatever.  Just to make myself clear:

I have absolutely no problem with “gun violence”, provided it’s of the kind where potential victims ventilate the goblins who are trying to harm them and/or take away their possessions violently and unlawfully.

And it was people like me who by extension would have run afoul of Citi’s so-called “Commercial Firearms Policy”.

So I’m glad they’ve had a change of heart — no doubt brought on by the Trump Administration’s overt hostility towards corporate fuckery of this nature — but even so, fuck ’em, the chiseling Shylocks.

I finally managed to pay off my credit card balance from Bank of America — the first and most public of the anti-gun banks — and closed the account.  My CitiAA card is next on the chopping list. It may take some time because the balance is still quite high — air tickets for New Wife’s various family visits to Australia and Seffrica, hello — but pay it down I will, make no mistake.  and then it’s bye bye, too.

Connectivity Assholes

Corporate Fuckery, Drive Time, Two-Minute Hate

Normally I reserve the above epithet for people who have their phones surgically attached to their hands, or bosses who insist that employees Stay.In.Touch.At.All.Times., yeah even unto night time, weekends, and vacations.  (Just because you’re attending your sister’s wedding or mother’s funeral — requiring use of paid time off [PTO] instead of compassionate leave, FFS — doesn’t mean that your boss shouldn’t be able to demand your time to attend to That Pressing Corporate Need.)

No, the connectivity assholes I refer to here are “services” like GM’s OnStar, Hyundai’s Blue Link, NissanConnect, AcuraLink and Toyota Connect.  Via Insty, I see the following is happening (from the annals of Corporate Automotive Bastardy):

Connected services is a catch-all term for everything your car can send and receive over the internet. It includes features such as automatic 911 call-outs after an accident, roadside assistance after a breakdown, over-the-air (OTA) software updates, vehicle health reports which can be sent to your dealer, wi-fi hot spots in the vehicle, and phone apps that allow you to connect to and even control some of your car’s functions.

They’re also big business. Most connected services require a paid subscription once the free trail (usually three months to a year) runs out. As more and more of them are added to your dashboard, automakers hope to make billions of dollars annually just on subscriptions. That doesn’t mean older vehicles will be supported forever, though.

Anyone who’s ever touched a device with a computer chip in it knows that device will eventually be obsolete. Cellphones, even if they still work fine, will eventually stop receiving software updates. Right or wrong, this is the way of the world. The average American, though, keeps their car for much longer than they keep their phone, and the average age of a vehicle in America is nearly 13 years old. Meaning, a lot of people could potentially be affected if other automakers follow Acura’s lead in cutting off cars newer than the average. And that’s not to mention those who own used examples of older models.

While it’s arguably bad customer service, there’s no law or contractual obligation requiring automakers like Acura to continue supporting older models with outdated hardware and software. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Yeah, click HERE to accept the (300 pages of) Terms & Conditions Of Service.  (Wait;  you all do read those before clicking, right?)

Somebody tell me how many times I’ve ranted on these pages about people handing over their privacy and freedom of action in the name of “conveeeeenience”, because I can’t be bothered to look it up.

This is why, in all my lottery dreams, I am convinced that I would never buy a modern car, but would pay a premium (in service / maintenance costs etc.) just to own a car that is completely and utterly under my personal control.  I have actually come to the point where I would buy any car — in reasonable working condition — that has an ordinary key to start it, whose operating system contains not a single chip and does not send my usage data to just anyone who wants to see it, for whatever reason — which includes insurance companies, the police, the State, the advertising industry and all the other forms of bureaucratic bastardy that have infested our personal lives like some creeping fucking cancer.

A pox on all of them.

Don’t Care

Corporate Fuckery, Retailing

Of course we saw this coming:

Walmart is warning it plans to raise prices due to tariffs, despite the fact April’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) showing President Donald Trump’s tariffs did not affect consumer prices.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon issued the update during an earnings call on Thursday, stating that they will try to keep prices “low as possible,” but the reality is, they are unable to absorb all of the costs due to tariffs.

“But given the magnitude of the tariffs, even at the reduced levels announced this week, we aren’t able to absorb all the pressure given the reality of narrow retail margins,” McMillon stated, adding, “The higher tariffs will result in higher prices.” 

Utter bullshit.  As far as I can see, the tariffs may have affected the price of Chinese goods, but if anything, the goods made in places like Thailand, Taiwan and Pakistan should be reduced with all those other countries getting lower or non-existent tariffs.  So yeah, some of Walmart’s prices on Chinese merchandise should go up, but what they’ll do is raise all their prices to minimize the much-higher Chinese prices.  It’s called “spreading the load” in retail-speak.

Don’t care, because I’ll just stop buying non-foods at Walmart until things quieten down, and buy only the foodstuffs there that I absolutely cannot get anywhere else.  Last time I looked, that’s only one product, and amazingly, it’s made in the U.S.A. anyway.

Besides, if Walmart were truly committed to keeping prices lower, they’d improve their efficiency by ditching their fucking ultra-woke DEI practices — which would never have been instituted in the first place had Sam Walton still been around.  But they’re not going to do that, are they?

Feel free to do what you think is proper in your own circumstances.

But for me?  Toodle-oo, WallyWorld.

De-Humanization

Corporate Fuckery

It began, as these things so often do, with the banks.  “Bank tellers cost money”, they realized, so they looked at the data:  which showed that something like 95% of a teller’s job involved handing cash to customers.

So:  ATMs.  And instead of talking to a human when collecting your money, you had to rely on remembering a personal identification number and hoping that the mechanized teller wouldn’t screw up the money count.  Of course, there was a “benefit” to the customer:  24-hour banking (provided there was a working ATM where you needed it).  So one more little dent in human interaction, because who doesn’t want convenience?

Supermarkets did the same thing, eventually, when scanning systems became good enough to work more or less unsupervised — well, one supervisor to oversee eight checkout terminals was cheaper than paying eight checkout clerks, after all.

Here, the benefit was not customer convenience, because it takes the average customer much longer to process their own transaction than it does a trained cashier.  But screw the customer’s time and inconvenience, as long as we don’t have to pay for it, went the retailers’ thinking.  (I know this, because I was there when the self-checkout systems were first tested.)

But what about the long waits in line we had to put up with before self-checkouts?  Well yes, there is that;  except that the long lines were caused by supermarkets not having all the registers manned in the first place — the first of such cost-cutting measures, you see.

In both cases, fewer human employees meant lowered expenses and higher profits.  (It may have been sorta-kinda-excusable for retail supermarkets, who run on impossibly-tight profit margins — but far less so for banks, who have no problem charging usurious rates on credit card balances, for instance, in an industry which has never had to deal with tight profit margins (remember:  pay 5% on customer investments, charge 12-19% for loans and 27% for credit card balances — and those are just the most obvious ones).

Anyway, some folks in Britishland, of all places, have decided that enough is enough:

Campaign by senior citizens to boycott automated tills aims to protect local jobs and fight isolation in the community.

At the Marks and Spencer store in Bridgwater, 10 self-service checkouts are sitting in a row waiting to be used.
The one manned checkout, however, has a queue five-people deep. “If there’s someone on the till, I would rather wait four or five minutes to have a conversation,” says Antony James, a 59-year-old resident.
His sentiment is shared by many in the Somerset town where the Bridgwater Senior Citizens’ Forum has launched a rebellion against automated checkouts.
I just wish that everyone did this, and not just Old Pharttes.

Myself, I use cashiers most of the time, provided that I won’t have to wait for too long in line.

But what really gets up my nose is when there’s a waiting line in both automated and cashier points.  That is when I go all Old Phartish and find a manager to yell at.  And I mean yell, because frankly, it’s past the time for politeness and it’s what they respond best to.

My line:  “I was in the supermarket business for over thirty years, from stock clerk to cashier to store manager to senior executive in Head Office.  I know how supermarkets run, and you’re running this one really badly.  Now are you going to open another register or must I get in touch with your district manager or Area VP?” 

And if he whines that there just isn’t another cashier available, I yell:  “Then YOU open the till and run it until one does become available.”

Sometimes I just identify as a woman.  Named Karen.  And it doesn’t feel too bad.

Finally, from the above linked article:

The backlash appears to be even bigger in the US. Under new laws proposed in February, supermarkets would have to comply with rules that would limit self-checkout use to when a regular manned lane is open. Major supermarkets including Walmart, Target and Costco have begun limiting or banning self-checkouts.

That has not been my experience locally, but I wish it was.  I’d better end this post before I get really cranky.