Yesterday, quietly minding my own things, I received a strange email in my personal inbox:

From: Nicolas_lassus@yahoo.com (That’s me! … usually a sign of a spam email or virus)

Subject: (French Consulate in Hong Kong and Macau) Confirmation (in French of course)

Seeing the subject line I thought that the consulate was reminding me that my new passport I requested was sitting in their drawers waiting for me to pick it up… but wrong I was! Although I cannot recall ticking a box saying I want to receive anything from my dear Consulate when I applied for a passport a month ago (my last interaction with the consulate), here I get a “confirmation” for my subscription to the Consulate information newsletter.

Luckily there is a link for me to modify my subscription in the email. This leads to a page where I can choose between HTML and text format, and where I can unsubscribe. Note though how the link says “modify your subscription” and not “if you want to unsubscribe bla bla bla”. But then I stop… would unsubscribing from this newsletter make me a bad citizen? Will the government flag me and check my tax receipts for omissions (I actually never worked in my own country, and thus never had a tax declaration done there)? Anyway. I decided that it was safer for me to at least pick up my passport before removing my name from the distribution list… or at least see what the first newsletter will look like.

It is funny how governments in the UK and Canada seem to be at the forefront of user experience and accessibility… and how the French government still does not get the concept of letting users opt-in to a newsletter… scary!