No – Really!
I know I stand out in any public area with my constant argument over providing my personal information.
- I don’t want to be on the marketing lists
- I don’t want to receive calls or emails
- I don’t want you to sell my information
Yet almost everywhere you go you are asked for your personal details and met with incredulity when you say no or have the temerity to question why the business needs that information. More often than not it’s because that’s the next field that the poor employee is required to fill. Sometimes made mandatory!
Guess what – if you mandate data entry rest assured my data will not reflect any relationship to me (“NoYouCantHaveMyemail@none.com”)
In some respects, I am probably fighting a losing battle since my email and cell are fairly easy to obtain but a recent vaccine booking experience proved the point to me. In this case, my email and cell were required before I could even try to book a vaccination appointment. So wanting to be sure I got messages once I booked I entered my real email and mobile phone, only to discover that the vaccine I wanted to obtain was not available. I abandoned the process and moved on to the next business. That journey was an exercise in frustration as I waded through multiple sites from CVS, Walgreens, Harris Teeter, Safeway, and Giant all offering bookings but failing to provide either appointments or information on the details of the actual vaccine they would be offering.
For similar reasons to Eric Topol, I am holding out for the Novavax vaccine since I too have “only had mRNA shots until now, and wanting to get the advantage of heterologous (mix and match) added kick in immune response (as compared to homologous/same vaccine dosing)”
I think it was less than an hour before the stream of emails and even text messages started to appear – Walgreens is insistent that I finish my scheduling. But with no unsubscribe option available and the only option with text messaging to “STOP” guess what
Any message from Walgreens that shows up in my email or attempts to text message me ends up being immediately blocked, never seen by me, moved to spam, and deleted.
