Of flipkart and facebook

I have stopped shopping at flipkart of late and to be honest I am a little saddened by this. I have always wanted flipkart to stand up to and beat amazon in India. There are times I have bought products at flipkart even though they were a little more expensive.

But flipkart has been getting excessively pushy of late. It was one thing to receive an incessant stream of email messages with special offers that appeared to be suspiciously similar to list price, but it is another level entirely when flipkart insists on saving my credit card details without giving me a choice to save them for faster one click processing. As soon as I realized this, I went to ‘My Account’ and removed my credit card details and then called the bank and got a new card.

Paranoid? Perhaps. But the next time I read about a hacker or an insider stealing credit card details of a million people, I know I can grin while others bear it.

I am astounded that flipkart would try this stunt when their users are getting ever savvier about data security. They are not quite facebook, who can dare to change their privacy policies without giving users any choice in the matter. After all, flipkart only sells stuff; books and kitsch. Facebook on the other hand provides us with a platform to show off our perfect selfies with our plastic pouts and Patel-shots (the spell checker offered this term). Perhaps even more important, facebook provides us with a vent for our withdrawal symptoms from app addiction. Facebook has figured out that our twitchy fingers need to do something when they feel the need for a new hit. We can now hold out our iPhone and take a shot next to our new car, type in "My new ride," or "My new wheels", upload it and bite our fingernails while we wonder if the number of likes will reach a respectable level. There is no way that reading an Isaac Asimov or a Salman Rushdie is going to beat that achievement.

What were you thinking flipkart?