This increasing trend is extremely annoying - and worrying.
Several times here in the UK I’ve been trying to reach out to companies I have relationships with (e.g. my phone provider) only to find they want me to DM them on Twitter or Instagram.
There’s no fucking way I’m using some proprietary service to have a convo with my phone company, especially when A) I don’t even have an account on the service and don’t want one and B) the convo will contain info about my phone account and personal info, and no way should I be sharing that over such a channel.
As far as I’m concerned it should be straight up ILLEGAL for companies to offer official contact on big tech platforms, when they have no control over how data in the chat is later used.
If they want to offer online chat, it should be through a third party who does that as their primary business model as a paid service, and can give explicit contractual guarantees on data storage and ownership.
I would go one step further and require all companies to provide an email address that must be clearly listed on a “contact” page, including a PGP public key to allow for encryption if desired.
If they want people to use their chat bot, the chat bot just needs to actually be good.
This increasing trend is extremely annoying - and worrying.
Several times here in the UK I’ve been trying to reach out to companies I have relationships with (e.g. my phone provider) only to find they want me to DM them on Twitter or Instagram.
There’s no fucking way I’m using some proprietary service to have a convo with my phone company, especially when A) I don’t even have an account on the service and don’t want one and B) the convo will contain info about my phone account and personal info, and no way should I be sharing that over such a channel.
As far as I’m concerned it should be straight up ILLEGAL for companies to offer official contact on big tech platforms, when they have no control over how data in the chat is later used.
If they want to offer online chat, it should be through a third party who does that as their primary business model as a paid service, and can give explicit contractual guarantees on data storage and ownership.
I would go one step further and require all companies to provide an email address that must be clearly listed on a “contact” page, including a PGP public key to allow for encryption if desired.
If they want people to use their chat bot, the chat bot just needs to actually be good.