Tim Dower: RealMe wants too much

Look, thanks so much for taking part in this, just a little experiment on people's reaction to, response, and experience with this portal passport arrangement: RealMe.

That kind of, well, it's been around for a little while, it's had a bit of a refresh, and now they're trying to push it and promote it.

Here's, here's another one.

Gary says ‘I've used RealMe for some years now at on a very regular basis and have no issues at all, generally. So, nine out of 10.’

Right at the other end of the scale, here's Warwick: ‘Score zero. It's a Nate National Animal Identification and tracking electronic ID tagging system for people. Orwell’s nightmare realized.’

Now, look, I'm kind of, I'm swaying towards your side of things Warwick, so I'm not gonna call you a conspiracy theorist or anything.

It wants too damn much information for a start, far too much.

I wanted to use it for the purposes of a small charity that I'm involved with and some paperwork that we need to do, okay?

So, in order to get established you have to fill in all this business of the getting in, the identity, the password.

And then you've got this very, very early internet security system, you know, where they used to ask you the question about your first animal or what school you went to, and you're supposed to remember what you said in response. Should you need to refresh it, you go through all that palaver. Now they've added a second layer, so you've got two tier authentication.

So, you've got the phone text thing, you know, and it goes beep and there's your number and you gotta go through all that.

When it got to the point where they're asking me what night of the week I cut my toenails, I thought, you know, I'm not into this! It's too much.

So, it's clunky, it's clumsy, and it takes so long. It wants everything, it just wants too much of you.

So, in the end I gave up, I got very cross.

They sent me, they said, all right. Last thing now, you gotta go and get your photo taken at the AA.

You gotta get your photo taken at the AA.  

You tried to get anything done at an AA office recently? You're a more patient person than I am.

So, I'm gonna give it a one.

I didn't want to sort of taint things by giving you my score right at the outset, but good to hear that some people have persisted and managed to get somewhere with the whole thing. 

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