Digital Doppelgängers

I guess most of us have tried googling ourselves from time to time, and sometimes have even found ourselves. Depending on how common your names is, and how online your namesakes are, results can vary. I’m not a media personality or someone with a large online presence in the pursuit of work, so I typically find I’m hidden away behind more visible doppelgängers. Such is life online.

I’ve also been amongst the early adopters of tech, meaning I have a few of the names sewn up, the monikers for email or domains and the like. That’s great for ease of use, but as time as gone on has some twists too.

Given the profusion of products out there, people are signing up to new suppliers, for new accounts, frequently. Despite autocomplete and autocorrect functionality, they make mistakes. Add in those transactions where people have to give an email address verbally, it compounds things.

So reasonably often I get those email alerts from some websites that someone has been trying to log in in an unusual place, or a series of password reminder emails and login codes that definitely I didn’t request. Luckily, with 2FA etc set up on many sites, I’m not too worried.

Alongside those though, come bursts of other emails, reaching me presumably because a namesake has somehow mistyped etc their email. Not a week goes by without this happening. Mostly they’re one off for that site, but not always. Amongst the everyday life emails I’ve had erroneously this way:

• multiple receipts for vehicle work
• garden service requests and their follow up
• minutes for local (to a digital doppelgänger) community meetings
• follow up requests to meetings
• recurring invoices to digital services that, despite being paid monthly, they’re presumably not able to use
• debt collectors
• bank and credit card statements
• real estate follow ups

I particularly like the ones where a company speaks of ‘knowing their customers’ when they clearly don’t.

There’s also the less mundane ones:

• personal emails copied into a group, where someone is writing of life events, a birth, an illness, or worse.
• notice of a medical appointment, and then later a ’thanks for your visit - come again’, meaning presumably the appointment was kept despite the email missing.
• tickets for an event

Now, typically when I come across these emails I simply delete them. Some personal ones I sometimes send a bland reply email along lines of ‘you have the wrong email address’. In doing that though, its striking how many companies just don’t have a reply-to email address enabled, or one included in the message footer. This is particularly crazy for emails that carry a legalistic ’email intended for the designated recipient only, if you’ve received it in error you must delete it and notify us of the error’ when they don’t provide a contact email.

Back in the earlier days of online banking, I can still remember getting someones credit card statements. I thought they’d probably fix it themselves when their emails didn’t arrive, but after a few months I tried to do something. I found a contact email address, forwarding the statement on explaining they’d entered the wrong email address for one of their customers and were now, in likely breach of data protection laws, sending me confidential information.

I expected to hear no more on it. Amazingly, a few days later I got a reply back. The bank was asking me to provide my contact details before they could investigate the issue I’d given them. I found a contact email address for someone senior in their organisation - head of data protection I think it was. Thankfully their reply was swift: ‘ah, I see your point. Let me deal with it’.

Over time I’ve probably had erroneous emails like this from around 14 digital doppelgängers around the world. International dialling codes, named cities and the like being a rough measure of distinct people. Mostly this is from anglophone countries, given my name. But what is striking is how often it happens from the US. (In case you’d not realised, I’m in the UK).

Digging in to why this might be the case, I came across some reports into customer signup processes. It seems that in Europe and the UK, data protection laws mean companies are much more likely to include a verification step in their signup process, one that requires an email to be received and clicked on before the process continues. But in the US, this is less common thanks to the drop out rate companies experience with customers abandoning the transaction because of the inconvenience they perceive. Reports also said it culture as well as law that is behind this.

Beyond the signup process though, its also weird (to a European) how American organisations don’t all too often have an actual contact email address listed on their emails, or on their website. 1-800 numbers proliferate (not so useful from outside the US, or those who dont want to waste time on a phone call), but free email, not so much.

So it seems I’m going to go on getting some weekly erroneous emails indefinitely. As an inight into life online though, its intriguing that so much faith is given to an unverified piece of data to ‘know your customer’, and that somehow with all the browser aids we have like autocomplete, it still gets entered wrong.

Still, some thoughts:

• double check your emails when signing up. The recipient might not be benign like me.

and

• companies:
  • include a verification step in signup. You dont know you have a customer until you do.
  • include a usable contact email address in your email like in the footer

I’ll go back to my email then, deleting a few more.