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Great, stupid lawsuits, exactly what the world needs. The bank's lawyers took the wrong approach, IMO. The law (as quoted in the article) says: > The data sub

Great, stupid lawsuits, exactly what the world needs. The bank's lawyers took the wrong approach, IMO. The law (as quoted in the article) says: > The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her. This doesn't have that much to do with how a certain name is displayed anywhere. Can I get an airline to change their systems if they abbreviated my name on my boarding ticket? Yeah, I don't think so. The airline could say "well we have the proper name in this database over here". And so could the bank.

CRConrad 5y ago
> This doesn't have that much to do with how a certain name is displayed anywhere. Indeed it doesn't, so no thanks to you for muddling the issue by mixing that in. > Can I get an airline to change their systems if they abbreviated my name on my boarding ticket? Well, since they're the ones insisting that it look exactly like on your ID, if it looks different because they mangled it and then they don't let you board because of their own cock-up, then I'd imagine even you would be slightly miffed...? So yes, you should be able to expect them to fix their systems so that doesn't happen, shouldn't you? > The airline could say "well we have the proper name in this database over here". And so could the bank. No they can't, because they don't: The point here was that this wasn't just some printing or other display function, but how the name was stored; as far as this bank was concerned, this customer's name was something it actually wasn't. How one can claim this isn't in contravention of a law that states personally identifying data stored about people should be correct is frankly incomprehensible; our names are among the most personal things about us and our main identifyer. All in all, your whole screed comes off as yet another piece of typical reflexive-but-unreflected pro-corporate (usually American) Libertarian dri^H^H^H propaganda.
toyg 5y ago
> well we have the proper name in this database over here". And so could the bank. I expect this is how they will eventually solve the issue - the customer-visible parts will be insulated from the old system with stuff that can handle Unicode. Chances are they currently don't have such insulation, producing documents with the wrong names, hence the complaint (bank statements are often used as proof of ID). Btw this is not a stupid law. Accents are important parts of languages, the tech to handle them has been around for decades now, there is no excuse for willful illiteracy.
- lokedhs 5y ago
  It's more than that. In many languages, they aren't accents but different letters. In Swedish, the letter ä is not just an a with two dots over it. It's a completely different letter, pronounced differently and is sorted in a different part of the alphabet. Changing ä to a could compeltely change the meaning of a word. For example, "räka" means shrimp, while "raka" means straight. The same goes for names. Misspelling the name by not using the correct characters is frustrating and shouldn't be necessary when we have Unicode. I think everyone can imagine how annoying it would be to have a random letter in one's own name be replaced by some other letter. Yes, I'm personally annoyed by this, since my name also has one of these letters.

CRConrad 5y ago

> This doesn't have that much to do with how a certain name is displayed anywhere. Indeed it doesn't, so no thanks to you for muddling the issue by mixing that in. > Can I get an airline to change their systems if they abbreviated my name on my boarding ticket? Well, since they're the ones insisting that it look exactly like on your ID, if it looks different because they mangled it and then they don't let you board because of their own cock-up, then I'd imagine even you would be slightly miffed...? So yes, you should be able to expect them to fix their systems so that doesn't happen, shouldn't you? > The airline could say "well we have the proper name in this database over here". And so could the bank. No they can't, because they don't: The point here was that this wasn't just some printing or other display function, but how the name was stored; as far as this bank was concerned, this customer's name was something it actually wasn't. How one can claim this isn't in contravention of a law that states personally identifying data stored about people should be correct is frankly incomprehensible; our names are among the most personal things about us and our main identifyer. All in all, your whole screed comes off as yet another piece of typical reflexive-but-unreflected pro-corporate (usually American) Libertarian dri^H^H^H propaganda.

toyg 5y ago

> well we have the proper name in this database over here". And so could the bank. I expect this is how they will eventually solve the issue - the customer-visible parts will be insulated from the old system with stuff that can handle Unicode. Chances are they currently don't have such insulation, producing documents with the wrong names, hence the complaint (bank statements are often used as proof of ID). Btw this is not a stupid law. Accents are important parts of languages, the tech to handle them has been around for decades now, there is no excuse for willful illiteracy.

lokedhs 5y ago
It's more than that. In many languages, they aren't accents but different letters. In Swedish, the letter ä is not just an a with two dots over it. It's a completely different letter, pronounced differently and is sorted in a different part of the alphabet. Changing ä to a could compeltely change the meaning of a word. For example, "räka" means shrimp, while "raka" means straight. The same goes for names. Misspelling the name by not using the correct characters is frustrating and shouldn't be necessary when we have Unicode. I think everyone can imagine how annoying it would be to have a random letter in one's own name be replaced by some other letter. Yes, I'm personally annoyed by this, since my name also has one of these letters.