Skip to main content

Naming and Shaming

Interesting way to collect debt - by naming and shaming the person. The strategy could make anyone squeamish:

Reports of OKash using social shaming started to surface almost as soon as the app went live. And people immediately felt the fallout. A University of Nairobi student told me on Twitter that the texts cost him his relationship, and another user told me his boss almost fired him for embarrassing the company. Another user, who wished to remain anonymous, told me he had read the fine print and knew OKash that would contact some people if he didn’t repay. 

Such are the uses of social networks, My father can be a stubborn old man sometimes refuse to do go see a doctor and instead tough it out at home. As soon as I get wind of such incident, I alert members of the extended family who can start leaning on him to do what is right. Depending on the situation at had and the sense of urgency I instill on my relatives, we can see results in as little as a couple of days. Not quite social shaming but he definitely does not enjoy receiving calls and messages on the same topic from an assortment of folks. 

.. OKash is only one of many companies around the world using social networks to leverage the power of shame. Last January, a local court in China’s Hubei province used WeChat to release a “map of deadbeat debtors.” In Russia, an online newspaper launched an app called Parking Douche that let citizens upload photos of badly parked cars, which were then fed into pop-up ads on the paper’s website. Before the 2018 US midterm elections, an app called VoteWithMe was released that made it easy for users to check the voting histories of people in their contacts.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...