In Brussels we are increasingly reaching a point where we can no longer talk to people face-to-face without technical hurdles and blockades. It’s clear why the Gang of Angry Elders are angry.
I simply entered a law office as a prospective customer. The door man said all visitors must register on the touchscreen tablet they had mounted on the desk, which made email and phone number a required field in order to advance to the next screen before submitting the registration. This is in Belgium, where the GDPR has a data minimisation protection in Article 5. You must surrender an email address (likely to a Microsoft user) as a precondition to sitting in the same room with someone.
Law offices, press offices, banks, and NGOs (some of which protect human rights) have put these security gatekeepers in their lobbies to prevent people talking to people. You ask to talk to someone and the response is always “do you have an appointment”? When the answer is “no”, they are helplessly incapable of making an appointment then and there. It’s a new level of human dysfunctionality.
Some Dexia branches have a very narrow time slot for people without appointments. You must get there early in hopes to get a queing position that does not get cut off at the end of the time slot.
The concept of a supplier that is subservient to the customer’s needs has been lost. It has flipped because too many boot-licking consumers are simply willing to be a doormat.
The persistence of CAPTCHAs proves this. If enough people were wise enough to refuse to solve CAPTCHAs, the CAPTCHAs would natrually be discontinued. But CAPTCHAs remain because too many boot-lickers are serving their corporate masters.
That does not seem to be the reality down on the ground. A guy was complaining about his 50 EUR cash deposit being refused because he could not prove the source.
Maybe you are thinking what the law mandates, in a situation where banks are free to be more extreme than the law? A lot of banks generally try to be “overachievers” when it comes to legal compliance because consumers are pushovers and regulators only care about the legal infringements that concern the state and not consumers. Some banks refuse cash deposits entirely and outright. So if that’s legal, why would it not be legal to demand proof of source on a deposit of €50?
BTW, if you find a bank that minimally complies with the law and gives the full legally permissible amount of privacy to customers (and respects GDPR data minimisation laws), please let us know! I don’t think such a thing exists.