Recording Your Words
Invasion of privacy happens to us every single day. Every time you call the phone company, Credit Card Company or even a doctor’s office you get a message that says your call might be recorded for quality assurance.
I don’t consider that anything other than taping what I am saying to make sure they might have heard me right. I hate to have to mince my words or watch what I say every time I make a phone call to any office or just saying hello to a friend who might work for one of these companies.
It’s amazing that the cell phone companies haven’t capitalized on this when people make calls and say they might be recorded to make sure the person receiving your call can replay your conversation at any time. I especially love when they say if you do not want your call recorded please tell the person before beginning your conversation. Right, I doubt that they are going to turn off the tape just because you requested not having your words recorded.
Dealing with government agencies, blood labs, card companies or even making an appointment to get your car inspected requires that they record your conversation for training or quality purposes. Phone tapping and hacking is wrong I feel this is equally as wrong. If I want to have a personal conversation with a doctor’s office, insurance company or anything that requires some degree of privacy, why would I want anyone else to listen in or hear what was being said?
I know they claim it’s to protect the customer, their jobs and who knows what else, but I feel that recording conversations is wrong and limits what people can accomplish. What about the representative that is rude and not helpful? Does their supervisor do anything about that? Is there any recourse to stop people from listening in to your conversations and recording them? How many people record things on their own and then have to hope they do not get caught?
After dealing with an insurance issue a few years ago I realized that you really have to watch what you say and be alert when speaking to the representative who tried to twist my words when I questioned why a specific bill was not paid by my company. Little did I know that the doctor who read the x-ray was not a participating doctor in my plan. Had I been informed of that I would never have allowed him to read it. The worst part is he became a participating doctor in the plan the following day and there was no way to correct their oversight or error. Dealing with them was difficult and the office that did this had no qualms about sending the bill into collections.
Needless to say, it took a lot of fancy footwork to correct and solve the problem but, the representative from collections recorded my every word and I made sure they understood me even as I heard the beeps and bleeps on the tape. I don’t know about you but I would like to be able to speak with people and not have to be concerned that they are taping what I am saying or replaying my words after the conversation is over. What is to stop them from adding or deleting things or even doctoring the conversation? Probably nothing. This is just something that has bothered me for a long time. Would it be okay if we told these same people we were taping the conversation for our own quality assurance purposes?
