On Monday 10 Sep 2007 6:59 am, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > Credit card company employees are also going to > be tempted. However, I have some kind of > recourse, in their case. I can take them to > court, if I suspect that they are misusing my > details. I can create bad PR in the press for the company. > > Most of all, I can vote with my feet and use > another company. (see the "accountability" bit in > the quote above, which you've - doubtless for > excellent reasons - not addressed in your rant) > > I do not believe I have this choice with the > police. (Or with any government representative.) > Which is precisely why they need to be held to a > higher standard of accountability. > > I certainly do not believe this is a "naive > bias". Perhaps you'd like to educate me further?
Udhay can you educate me on how voting with your feet or taking them to a court in India can help if a Credit Card company employee spends Rs 100,000 on your credit card account and you get a bill 3 weeks later? You will then have to file an FIR and trust the very same police whom you are now assuming are dishonest and demanding they they not be trusted with your precious details. The rant that I quoted from that blog is fundamentally naive for the following reason: Trusting a bank and a credit card company means that you automatically trust a back-up system of law enforcement and justice that the bank promises you. Why then turn around and say that you do not trust that system of law enforcement and justice? Our balls (yours, and mine and the writer of the blog) are in a systemic vise but we choose to randomly complain about one insecure cog and not another equally insecure cog in the system. But the irony that causes me the greatest degree of amusement is that the writer of the blog would probably never use a cybercafe to reveal his bank and credit card details. He lives in a real world in which he realises that this would be stupid. But the blog writer chooses to comment on a virtual world in his mind in which the police crackdown on cybercafes is bad and he is a hero who is standing up for the privacy of nameless cybercafe users - a privacy that he does not believe in himself in the real world. Weird. And funny to me. Equally ludicrous is the naivete that assumes that "poverty driven greed" and "system of government" makes the cop untrustworthy, as if the rest of the system is immune from greed and the Indian system of government. shiv
