I spent two days on Privacy and Documentation Training. Although sitting there for two whole days is not something I prefer the most, the training did get me think of some interesting experience that I have had in the past two years, which directly can be linked to what was talked in the training.

• Example 1:
  I remember one day I got a phone call at home from a guy trying to promote some mobile and home line plan to me. He had very strong Indian accent to make me believe that it was another case of outsourced overseas call centre operation, which I hate the most. So when he asked me “how much do you normally spend on your land line telephone and mobile”, I burst out with something I normally don’t say, “why should I tell you about that? That’s my personal information….”

  Well, the poor guy was in a shock and the conversation obviously couldn’t go any further because of my refusal of answering his logically designed and leading questions. You know what? I never had felt so good about myself being on phone and reacting to those Telecom people. The things that I had said would have given him something to learn

• Example 2: I had one time when I had to return the product that I bought to the shop and get the full refund. There was no problem around that. The only thing annoys me was when the shop assistant was typing this refund order into her computer, she asked me “what is your post code”.I knew this could be just their procedure to deal with refund request, but out of blue, on that day I behaved quite strangely enough and even questioned her “why do I have to give you that information? I think it’s totally irrelevant”. The girl tried to explain to me that’s for the record and a mandatory requirement for their database. It sounded really not convincing, as I did have impulsion to tell her “to fix your database”, but that’s just not being me, I guess, so I told her my post code at the last.

• Example 3: The worst experience with giving out my personal information was once I got a phone call from a Chinese girl who rang to carry out a survey on my opinion about if I supported the idea of opening a Cruise between Sydney and Mainland China. I was happy to give her my opinions, but when she asked me to tell her what my name was, I got a bit cranky.The feelings around that were “why?” “what the hell is this about?” “Haven’t I been being polite and patient enough?” “What does she need my name for?” “What is she going to do with it? ” and at the last, she still couldn’t give me any reason to tell me why she needs my name. So I told her “you do know that I could give you a false name, do you?” Then I told her my name is Hilary (Clinton).

• Example 4: I have a colleague who told me a story about how she communicated with her bank people. One day her bank rang up and checked something with her. They asked her “what is her Date of Birth”. My colleague said “NO, YOU TELL ME what is my date of birth…as I gave the information to you and you have the responsibilities to keep them”. Isn’t this a good example? I just love it.

• Example 5: This happened on my dad when I was in Beijing a couple of months ago. My dad, who was a very healthy and self-content man until early of this year he got attacked by some shingles. It took a couple of months time for all the rashes disappear at the last, but the prognosis seems not very good and it has really been a long journey for him to put up all that had happened. When I was in Beijing at that time, he was still suffering the pain from the tips of affected nerves on the face and nobody can tell him how much longer this is going to take to fully get him out of this.I remember one day dad went to see a doctor who practised the Traditional Chinese Medicine in a hospital. By the lunch time, dad came back and looked very depressed and held even more negative feelings about his illness and the future treatment.

  Later on, when my mom and sister asked him what had happened, my dad told them that the doctor had a group of medical students coming in today on a rotation internship, and that doctor pointed my dad to them and said something like, “see, this is such a bad example of shingles and this man must be suffering a lot…..”

  My dad was struck and devastated. And badly enough, what that doctor did made him feel very low and bad. I couldn’t help getting so angry about it. That doctor had no rights to do such things without my dad’s consent to be presented as a medical case to any other people, and I hated the way how that doctor took it for granted and was so lacking of sensitivity about his patient’s feelings.

  Would you say that’s a privacy protection issue? and how much was my dad’s health information protected even in front of those HEALTH PROFESSIONALS? There are some real question marks over here….For ordinary people, like us, it’s not very hard to give those examples as they just happen in our life EVERYDAY