Have you noticed how secret squirrel everything has become? Or is that too confidential to tell you? Your doctor cannot leave a message on your phone because someone else may hear it and it could result in a loss of privacy and a whopping lawsuit. The medical center I go to for medical tests and advice will not release my own test results taken from my own body for my own sake to me personally or in the mail until and unless I sign a consent form allowing them to reveal confidential information about myself to myself.
If your 19 year-old daughter is hospitalized as mine was in her first year of college in the emergency room, the hospital cannot tell you and if you ask, they will not discuss her condition in that it may violate her privacy. They will send you the bill and ask for a fortune without telling you what it was for.
If you want to contact your Internet provider to take advantage of a rate reduction with no downside, you must provide mountains of proof that it is indeed you who is asking to save money.
If you want to deposit money into your own checking account, be it cash or check, you could be asked for photo i.d. to prove that you are really the account holder putting money into your own account rather than someone else’s. Apparently, this is a widespread problem - unknown people putting huge amounts of money into other people’s bank accounts for no apparent reason. Right!
And good luck if you are trying to find out whether your bank is planning to pay minimum or full amounts on automatic payments, sometimes crucial information. It is so confidential that they themselves cannot find out much less tell you even though it is all done for your sake.
If you want to inform your cell phone service that you want to let your service expire at the end of the two-year contract period, you will have to go through hoops to prove that it is really you making the request. As though strangers may know about your contract and its expiration date and have decided that you should stop without telling you. Even if you authorize another person to do everything on your behalf, the cell phone company requires that you are the one person in the world who can make the request even if you are in a coma or dead.
And when you finally convince the cell phone company or the health insurance company or the bank that you are the one and only, they say they will honor your request, but will never send acknowledgment. In order to verify that you succeeded in ending or changing what you wanted, you have to go through that whole process again.
Trying asking your 18 year-old’s school how your child is doing, the reply will always be - s/he is 18 or older and therefore an adult. All information concerning the student is confidential, even if the student is headed for ruin. But the school embraces this 13-year policy of considering 18 year-olds adults. They don’t have to deal with parents who are paying a fortune for the child’s education, and can be left to deal with a young, inexperienced, 18 year-old rather than a 40 year-old Ph.D. or high-powered lawyer.
How do we deal with this? First I think there should be egregious penalties for willfully exploiting any of our main communication and information systems. Second there should be reasonable safeguards as well as easy ways for authorized people to exercise their will and to then quickly receive written acknowledgment of any and all significant changes to their account.
I’d ask you to share this column with friends and relatives, but I am afraid this column is confidential, you probably should not have read it in the first place.
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