With the push for UK national identity cards being justified with sensational figures like an estimated £3.3Billion lost in identity theft, you would presuppose that government departments would take data protection very seriously. You would really expect them to be setting a standard.

When I complained to the UK Visa office I added my concern about the privacy of my data. 

As a VISA sponsor you have to provide key information to UK Visas such as copies of your bank statements, utility bills and so on. UK Visas offers no information or assurance as to how any of this information might be protected, how it is used, how long it is kept for, whether it is used for any other purpose, where it is kept, who has access to it, what media it is kept on or how it might be disposed of. There is no public information on their website. In responding to my complaint UK Visas choose to ignore my concerns and made no comment at all.

UK Visas are not alone. The most you will find on any Government web site is a standard internet privacy policy. Incidentally, UK Visas doesn't even have one of these.

Whatever happened to picking up the phone and talking to customers?

I received two letters from Direct Line. When they came through the letter box I didn't even open them. I assumed they were just part of the continuing junk mail I was receiving from Direct Line and I put them on the "junk mountain" for shredding later. 

A few weeks on,  when I finally get around to opening them for shredding, I glance at the contents. The first letter advises that, because I haven't sent them evidence of my No Claims Discount, they were removing the discount from my premium resulting in an additional premium of £471.45. 

Obviously I hadn't answered the letter, so the next letter notifies me they are cancelling my insurance on, what would now be Tuesday. I wondered why Direct Line couldn't have just got the details directly from my previous insurer, to which Customer Service replied, the no claims discount was my responsibility.

Wouldn't be good if companies actually started to take some responsibility for their customers? Couldn't someone have picked up the phone, and talked to me, we had to do this in the end anyway?

I've already decided to not renew my insurance with Direct Line. I wanted to cancel it there and then but they quoted me over £200 as a cancellation charge.

When you start your computer the chances are you could actually go away and make a coffee while you wait for it to complete. Overtime your computer becomes so slow that you either replace it or you take a hammer to it in a moment of angry frustration. You only have a 256K or 128K memory card when they seem to be churning them out now with a 1GB card as standard.

Of course, this will help, and you will see an instant difference at start-up. Until, that is, you start to install all the other programs you used to run on your old computer.

The majority of these programs think you want to use them every time you start your computer. They also think it's perfectly ok to communicate with "VGER" when you're connected to the internet and even try to automatically restart your computer if they find and install an update. Marketing are likely to consider it beneficial to have the program load automatically. The user isn't likely to quickly forget the software or the maker or use an alternative, you're right there in their face every day.

This is fine if you actually want to use the program every day. If you only want to use it periodically then you should be able to easily turn it off, and when I say "easily" I mean you don't need a computer degree to do so or have to type "msconfig" or "regedit" into the start and run menu. Personally,  I would prefer my computer to start with only one program, Kaspersky anti-virus software. Everything else I would like to choose to start when I am ready.

However, the default on the majority of software installations seems to be to run when windows starts and to automatically search for updates or newer versions of the software when you're connected to the internet without giving you the option to change it.

I was actually surprised that MSN Messenger 7 included the ability to un-tick "run this program when Windows starts" in the options tab. Prior to this version this wasn't included as an option. Instead you had to click start and run. Type in regedit.exe and click ok. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersion un. Once you're there click on the MSMSGS entry and select delete. Then click yes to confirm.

At least one piece of software has made a positive change, if only the rest would follow.