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It has been like trampling through the jungle.
Accounts, apps, email addresses, websites and more cry out for your passwords. Some insist on a specific set of characters, caps, punctuation and numbers. The more careful entities do a two factor authentication. Airlines and banks provide electronic fingermark access. Others send a one time use six digit pin to your nominated mobile telephone number.
And yet the fraudsters and scammers are lurking in the bush.
Out in the wild world are people using online love lures. Victims usually have not met their scam better half in person face to face - and depend on messages, electronic photos and online voices. I am confused, don't you think you want to feel a budding lover in the flesh first in any serious relationship?
There may be a rising tendency for on screen commercial transactions to avoid meeting the other side. We are not interested to meet the cook in our food deliveries. We get our payments from human beings we are not interested to know. So many consumers only interact with the middle broker or deliverer - or maybe not. Even parcels are just left at your nominated place and the deliverer simply takes a photograph of where he or she left it.
House recipients put up front door cameras with apps on phones. Gone are the days that we get a chance to chat with service people. Is it because human beings are so entangled with other things that they cannot wait for a delivery? Yet we patiently wait for the arrival of the plumber, electrician, gardener and tradie.
There used to be someone home to receive things. Now they can go to lockers in shopping centres. Oh yes, the traditional local post office is gone. Fancy cafes are more popular in suburbs - and everyone perhaps goes there on a regular basis more than any other place. Cafes can play another role as collection centres, more than newsagents.
Online commerce has spiked to such proportions that the cardboard and materials used to pack parcels are becoming a menacing disposal matter.
Some deliveries still insist on a signature by the recipient - and the seller just wants any form of mark, not a proper personalised signature, as proof of receipt.
How do we get satisfied that we are actually interacting with kosher and authentic other parties online?
As online consumers, we are always challenged that we are not robots. We hardly get to authenticate parties on the other side of the electronic interface. It truly feels like a one sided way of we always having to prove ourselves in an electronic transaction.
#yongkevthoughts
