Privacy Should Be Normal: NBTV's Video on Avoiding Data Collection

I saw this video recently, and I found it fascinating and troubling. It shows just how absurd things are when you simply want to buy things and be left alone. The video, titled "They Asked For My Name. I Said No.," features Naomi Brockwell of the Naomi Brockwell TV channel, and it directly illustrates this problem.

[YouTube]

I found the most insightful part of this story to be the sheer difference between shopping online and shopping in a physical store. If Naomi had simply walked into the store and paid with cash or a non-traceable gift card, nobody would have asked her for a name, a phone number, or an address. Yet, because she made a proper online payment using a secure, masked card, the merchant's system effectively treated her like a fraud risk simply because her billing details (made-up because the card requires none) did not match her shipping details. This process is overly intrusive and demonstrates how merchants prioritize data collection over customer privacy. The irony is that the merchant's fraud logic also fails when someone buys a gift, where the shipping address should never match the billing address. As Naomi Brockwell notes, this highlights a situation where nobody really cares about privacy anymore -- and won't until it is too late.

It is up to us, the consumers, to make minimal disclosure the standard. My Streaming Life continues to be based around the need for security on all my devices, and in everyday life.