Thank you for filling out our survey. Stuff your opinions: it’s your personal data we wanted

I hear swearing coming from the kitchen. It is in German.

Good, this means I have an excuse to stop what I am doing – trying to stare out the newest dead pixel on my laptop display – and investigate downstairs. For the orator of gothic profanity is of course Mme D, a qualified TSFL* teacher, and I could do with a refresher lesson.

I should explain that Mme D is in the kitchen voluntarily; certainly not to cook. When we bought the house, we agreed that we would establish for ourselves independent home-office space for our respective work. I chose the modest spare bedroom upstairs and she chose a vast and frankly ostentatious corner of the kitchen table.

Rising from my modestly equipped videoconferencing studio, I saunter along the decked path alongside my modest indoor zen garden, across the modest bridge over the modest water feature, admiring the modest flock of flamingo passing overhead as I climb aboard the modest golf buggy that will take me to the modest bedroom door.

Downstairs, the rude expletives have gone on vacation and are now in French. I fear they may now have to stay there for another 14 days.

This is a shame as it is said that German is best for angry swearing. It is percussive and hits you like a couple of sharp slaps around the face. Back in 2004 I attended the European press launch in London of Apple’s iTunes Store, during which an Apple VP minion unexpectedly gave a theatre full of bored journalists a glimpse into to this particular are of Germanic culture. Trying to show off how easy it was to find international artists, we were treated to several seconds of a krautrock metal band screaming “Scheiße! Scheiße! Scheiße! Scheiße!” as he clicked wildly around the impenetrable iTunes interface to find something else. It certainly woke us up and gave the German-speaking journos a snigger.

French swearing, on the other hand, is the better choice for those occasions when you want to sound like a slightly risqué intellectual: for example, you are a renowned poet, articulate politician or member of the Académie française and want to call someone a wanker.

She-who-is-definitely-not-radioactive-any-more has been asked to complete an online feedback form. Yes, another. And when I say “another”, you understand this is already the seventeenth demand to fill out an online survey that she has received that day, and it is still only 10.00am. Hence the naughty words.

You must have noticed this, even in lockdown, but everyone insists that you fill out some kind of feedback survey that makes no sense whatsoever or is stuffed with questions that have no relevance to the nature or quality of service you received. Whether you have invested £1m in cloud provision or bought a tin of beans in a local supermarket using loyalty points, you get bombarded with increasingly insistent messages implying that failure to respond to their customer survey in a timely manner will lead to disastrous consequences for your personal well-being.

The ones that irritate me most of all are those miserable ‘How did we do?’ button panels located at the exits of truly ghastly places such as public toilets and international departures security.

I mean, the entire concept is bizarre bordering on the freaky. You’ve just spent ten minutes queueing for a toilet cubicle while standing in a lake of urine; then forced to make the best of the three remaining sheets of paper which are only accessible because you happen to have a pair of tweezers in your bag with which to tease them out of the theft-proof dispenser; all the while your eyes are streaming in the thick sulphurous atmosphere; then you have to attack the soap dispenser with a violent daga-daga-daga punching action to extract a single tiny droplet of slimey grey scum masquerading as a cleaning solution.

And just as you pass through the Exit Gate of this particular ring of Hell, you spot a ‘How did we do?’ panel and have to identify yourself as an emoji: either the grumpy gammon-faced twat or the disproportionately happy ‘I-did-big-jobs’ greenoid lunatic.

Exiting an airport security hall on one occasion I punched the unhappy red emoji and was immediately challenged by a member of staff who demanded an explanation for my choice. Basically, I had to give feedback on my feedback.

I explained that I had been queueing for half an hour before being ordered to half-undress. My water and almost-empty aftershave bottles were confiscated. I had to trudge along while holding up my beltless trousers like an old man through a metal detector that frankly would go beep even if you pushed a jellyfish through it. I was made to stand in an X-Ray machine and lift my arms above my head so that my loose trousers fell to my ankles to the sound of muffled laughter from the security staff. Finally I got shouted at to hurry up while rethreading my belt, tying my shoelaces, returning my belongings to various bags and pockets, and trying to find out where my boarding pass went.

And you want me to press Mr Happy Face?

“But everyone has to go through this,” the feedback-feedbacker reasoned. “It’s standard.”

In that case, why ask for feedback at all? I can picture the filthy makeshift field hospitals of the Crimean War where a young soldier has just had his leg sawn off without anaesthetic. As he’s wheeled away from the blood-stained operating table, Florence Nightingale is standing at the door with a clipboard, singing “How did we do? …eh?… What do you mean ‘In great pain and very miserable’? Everyone has to go through this! I’ll just write down you said ‘In fine spirits and hoorah for the British Empire’.”

Where else will we being seeing these emoji feedback fuckfaces? When leaving the dentist? The mammogram unit? The proctologist?

I’ve answered my own earlier question, of course. These surveys have three purposes, and none has anything to do with wanting to find out your opinion. First, it is supposed to stop you from going off on your own to a genuine customer feedback site and saying what you really think. The second is to create a false affirmation that something utterly shit is not perceived as utterly shit even though it really is – a kind of inverse gaslighting. The third is to be able to say you have complied with a duty to seek and obtain feedback from customers; and if customers do not tick Mr Happy Face, you must wear them down with further questions.

This is pretty much what Mme D has discovered, to her dismay. Having actually given in and completed a feedback survey, she immediately received a follow-up email to ask whether she was satisfied with the survey she’d just filled out. She clicked ‘Yes’ thinking that would make it go away, only to be led to a completely new survey asking for her opinion of the company’s customer survey provision.

Scheiße! Scheiße! Scheiße! Scheiße!

In fact, what she has revealed is the secret fourth purpose – a bit like Robocop’s hidden Directive 4 – of feedback surveys: to extract even more detailed personal information from you that they can sell while making you think you handed it over voluntarily.

To prove the point, Mme D has angrily clicked ‘one star’ for her feedback-feedback rating, only for a new text-entry field to pop up from nowhere asking her to explain what it is about her lifestyle and interests that persuaded her to give such a low score. She types a curt but polite response. But no, this is not enough: the survey won’t go away until she has written at least 400 characters into this field.

Effortlessly, she slips from German and French straight into fluent Irish, copying and pasting the words ‘arse feck’ repeatedly until she reaches the minimum character count and clicks the now-active Send button.

In this sense, it’s just an extension of those slightly irritating mini-questionnaires that you have to fill in before being given download access to a “free” white paper. In return for what turns out to be a 12-page PDF of high-level, detail-free marketing bollocks, you have given away your name, email, job title, industry sector, number of employees and inside leg measurement.

But if you too have noticed a sudden explosion of much more aggressive feedback bullying, be aware that the wild growth in this area is due to a perfect storm of changes brewing in how customer data is routinely misused. Ad blockers, GDPR, the switch-off of third-party web browser cookies, and the pandemic-induced withering of genuine advertising all contribute to a major headache to content publishers, service providers and product retailers alike. Their analytics are no longer giving them a realistic picture of who we are.

So how can they find out detailed personal information about customers “in these difficult times”? You can almost imagine a top-level boardroom pow-wow where all the VPs are stratching their heads about this conundrum, only for the tea-lady to pipe up: “You could always just ask them.”

I don’t mind being asked but unfortunately the kind of people implementing these feedback methods are as broken in their morals as the personal data industry itself. The whole system is broken. Brisé, if you like. Gebrochen, even.

Returning mournfully to my modest desk – which sits on a modest barge moored to a modest quay as the waves lap gently and modestly against the shore back in the spare bedroom – I see my smartphone is signalling that I have received an SMS.

It thanks me for cancelling my overpriced mobile contract. It asks if I would like to complete a feedback survey on how much I enjoyed my cancellation and whether I would like to recommend their cancellation service to my friends. I’m busy so I reply ‘No’.

I receive three new messages asking why.

ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He trusts that readers of Autosave is for wimps who signed up for email delivery every Friday used temporary email addresses. If not, he has a survey he thinks you might be interested in. [Oh, and in case you were wondering, if you view this post on the web, you can write comments…]

* TSFL: Teaching Swearing in a Foreign Language