#1 Passwords Why do some sites insist that certain criteria have to be met when choosing your password?
I use a lot of passwords, ranging from 14 characters up to 20-odd characters. To save me writing any of my passwords down, or having to remember each and every one, they are all based on certain basic 'roots', with a number of easily remembered variations on each.
Generally speaking, the more sensitive the site, the more complex and lengthy the password base I start from. I have easy to remember formulae for each site's password so I can quickly enter the correct one for each site.
So I find it so annoying when a website decides that I must have certain characters (e.g. upper case/special character/numbers) in the password I'm going to use there.
I appreciate the reasoning behind this, in that the longer and more varied your password, the harder it should be to crack.
But from a security angle, it simply doesn't work for me, as 90-odd per cent of the time, when I try to sign back in to some of these websites, I can't remember the password as I didn't set it up using my system. In these cases, I have to get them to resend the password to me, or send me details on how to reset it. And I'll guarantee that the very next time I try to sign in , I'll have to go through the whole ridiculous procedure again.
And don't get me started on sites that don't let you use a previous password when resetting
#2 Newsletter Duplication Why on earth, when, for example, one is redeeming a voucher, or maybe entering a competition online, do you often have to sign up to their newsletter to finalise whatever you're doing. And, even worse, why do some of them even do this surreptitiously without giving you an option to opt out at this stage.
And, if that's not bad enough, why can't they at least use software that's sophisticated enough to recognise that you may have actually already given them your email before
Here's an example from yesterday, where I've received duplicate email notifications from two site where I've had to supply my email more than once for whatever reason.
#3 'Free' trials, products, offers and services that automatically start charging you unless you remember to cancel I tend to steer clear of any 'free' stuff that requires handing over payment details for obvious reasons. But one has to tread carefully if a site you (obviously) trust already has your payment details...
I'm thinking here of Amazon. I recently signed up for a free month of their "Amazon Prime" service, and then realised that, unless I actually notified them that I wished to cancel after this month, they were going to automatically take a year's subscription fee of £79.
I know they make it fairly clear when you sign up that this is going to happen, although having said that, there have been a lot of cases of people being 'surprised' by a £79 debit appearing on their accounts. I would have thought that their automatic charging of the subscription payment unless one opts out should not be the default policy.