[conspire] OT: The 'Don't deal with crooks' rule, extended edition, in action

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ehud Kaldor (ehud.kaldor at gmail.com):

> While I do not disagree about emails, sending a paper letter would have
> gotten some attention (after all, somebody did go through and opened it,
> they might as well read it) to the form of "so sorry this was your
> experience. We have improved since, and here's a 20$ gift card to Sears for
> your trouble", and getting the same "we want you back!" __letter__ the
> following month.
> Probably a much better course of action would be to open a site for
> complaints about Discover, and gathering a critical mass. Your information
> is useless for the company as an individual as a glitch, and buying you with
> a gift card and forgetting all about it is much cheaper.

I think you might have somehow missed my central point:  It would have
been entirely _opposite_ to my goals to have improved/reformed Discover
Financial Services, Inc., DFS Financial Services LLC, or Discover Bank.

My goals were to remove shady companies from my life cleanly and
efficiently, to recommend that practice to others, to remind the
membership that _you can choose_ whom to do business with, and to remind
the assembled that their information has value.

All of those insights seem increasingly timely as Web 2.0 / Software as a
Service / 'free' Web application companies continue to proliferate:  A 
growing zoo of obscure firms run by people I don't know and have no
reason to trust or deal with want me to open a useless account
(http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20090107042749/http://uselessaccount.com/)
with them -- thereby legally creating a contractual business
relationship with thhem -- so I can use their proprietary software to 
host my data remotely and unreliably with no commitment towards
continuity of service, and all I have to give them is my privacy and the
legal right to spam me and sell private information about me to others.
What a deal!