Until recently I have been passive-aggressive on the entire visual verification issue, but today while attempting to reply to e-mail in Yahoo! Mail I was presented with Sender Verification. This is visual verification that yahoo is now placing on *every* outgoing e-mail you send.
I have verified it is every e-mail by sending a very simple message to myself with no trigger words.
The yahoo solution is the same stupid phone solution they have for other services that may or may not work.
Ladies and gentlemen now that Yahoo has extended this to its e-mail service it is only a short time before the problem reaches to other services like Hotmail.
Therefore, I am declaring war on all sites and systems of web based or electronic access that use visual verification in any way.
Big things will be happening on this front in the new year. I call on DREDF, DRA Legal, and any other interested parties (i.e. NFB or ACB) to take all necessary and appropriate legal action to address this growing problem online.
I personally don’t expect much to come from the two major consumer organizations in the United States on this since they seem more interested in other things like identifying money and fighting DVS.
I’m heading to Washington, DC in February and this *will* be on my agenda for discussion if it is necessary.
I will take personal action as well if I deem the other groups named above are not moving to address the problem.
However, until such time as public interest groups take up this issue I encourage you to go to the following website PlanetFeedback.com. You do not have to register, just choose the complaint radio button on the home page and in the search box that you tab to after the radio button enter yahoo or Google or any other company that you find using visual verification and then press enter. If the company name or any similar is in the database the site will return results. You also have to choose a category for your complaint. For our purposes you need to choose site navigation. If not in the database you have the opportunity to enter the companies contact details. If you cannot find a companies contact details to enter in the database send me an e-mail at rlynch80 at sbcglobal.net and I’ll get its information for you.
Once you have the company you need to write a detailed and well thought out complaint letter to the company. I suggest writing this letter using notepad and then copying and pasting it into the field you are provided by PlanetFeedback. You will also have a field for what you want the company to do. Here I suggest you discuss an audio feedback system or better yet for sites that you need to register for they can use an e-mail based verification or even a question based system like How do you spell dog, or What color is a red rose.
More coming on this in the new year, and oh yeah Marry Christmas.