Monitoring of web traffic on an online banking site. Risk or legitimate data collection?

LloydsTSB has redesigned its online banking service web site and I tried this out for the first time yesterday. The site, as well as displaying statements with the newest transaction at the top, claimed to have introduced new features which would make it easier for the user, but my own first impressions were far from favourable.

For a start there was a new quick payments page. They had provided a drop-down list of the recipients I had already set up. Paying one or more of these just entailed making a selection from the list and then choosing the amount and confirming the password as before. A link then enabled me to return to the same page to make another payment if I wished. Initially I assumed that this drop-down list had replaced the previous page of links and since it didn't include a reference number, though unhelpfully did include an 8 zero account number for credit card companies, I had an immediate problem as I had more than one account with the same institution. These had the same sort code and zeros account number. There was no way to distinguish between the two without the reference.

After a 10 minute wait on the online banking telephone helpline I was told that the old payments page could still be reached and I could make my payment there. This was true but there was no link back to it, so the process was going to take longer than before for multiple payments. This was supposed to be an improvement? Additionally the make payment and delete recipient buttons were very close together on different lines and I could see that deleting a recipient by mistake would be all too easy.

I've focused so far on usability, but a far more serious issue for me was the fact that the site momentarily redirected to statse.webtrendslive.com en-route to each new page. I eventually discovered that LloydsTSB are collecting marketing information in this way, but not until after I had wasted a considerable amount of time talking to technicians at an anti-virus software provider. They weren't knowledgeable enough and wanted to solve a non-existent virus problem with a sledge hammer approach. I'm always wary about researching viruses on the net as malicious sites can themselves introduce viruses whilst purporting to offer software to remove them. I did find discussions of webtrendslive on various forums though and once I had realised what was happening it was easy enough to block it using a Firefox add-on.

It's a shame that when asked, LloydsTSB's helpdesk staff only said that the presence of webtrendslive in the status bar was part of the workings of their website and didn't confess it was a 3rd party site. This kind of redirect is not what you expect in online banking and doesn't lead to confidence in the security of the site. When I also explained the usability problems the new site was causing, the helpdesk also didn't seem to think that an extra click to make multiple payments was an issue. "It's only one more click" they said. I suggested a new link would help, back to the payments page. It's a pity too that the choice of display order isn't set as a user preference as I'm sure not everyone will like this feature. The helpdesk promised to pass my comments on but I'll never know if they did. It would have been good to have been able to send the feedback to the right department. Someone there might have been more interested.

Digital Economy Bill

I've tuned in to BBC Parliament on and off over the last two days to hear the debate on the Digital Economy Bill. I have to say I was surprised how few members were in the House on an issue of such importance. If many MPs didn't realise how important the issue was then that alone should tell us that the whole matter needed far more debate than the government chose to allow.

While the House appeared to contain at most around 40 MPs at various stages of the debate, and at times far fewer, according to Hansard, 236 of them eventually voted. My MP wasn't amongst them so it would appear that I wasted my time contacting him about my concerns over this issue.

Can we be sure that the nearly 200 MPs who weren't in the chamber throughout the debate were actually following this elsewhere? If they were sitting in an internet cafe somewhere perhaps it should have dawned on them that in a year's time they might actually have to join the ranks of those trying to look interested on the green benches in the Commons chamber in order to find out what was being said, or at the very least remain in the House for the entire evening. If they had the luxury of living near enough to spend the evening at home then I hope they won't have the misfortune to be one of those whose internet accounts are temporarily suspended at some time in the future. The legal costs of fighting such a suspension will be beyond the means of the vast majority of people.

To tag or not to tag

I'm probably somewhat behind in finally exploring the possibility of using tags as a way of organising my bookmarks. I was still using IE6 until a couple of weeks ago I finally succumbed to all the messages telling me my browser was in urgent need of replacement and installed IE8. At a stroke, finding the right sub-folder to put a link in became a real headache as Microsoft in their wisdom had "improved" favorites and it was no longer possible to collapse the folders.

OK, so those of you who've been living with this for a while have adapted somehow - or left to explore other browsers, but my journey had just begun. I began by submitting a support ticket to Microsoft. I was amazed at the level of service but the guy trying to help me was incredulous at the complexity of the folder system I had set up and he could see why I was having problems. His suggested workaround was never going to work for me. If I achieved nothing more than my concerns being passed on to the project team for IE9 perhaps I will have achieved something.

Perhaps it was time to move into the world of social bookmarking and explore the possibility of finding links using tags not folders, so my next venture was to sign up for del.icio.us and install the Delicious Bookmarks add-on in Firefox. It was at this point that I realised I had some 4000 links stored in folders about 3 deep. It soon became apparent that letting the add-on choose tags for all these links was a big mistake. Any tag I chose to search for brought up a myriad of sites that did not contain the one I wanted.

Tags may be a brilliant idea if you are starting from scratch but for anyone with an existing hierarchy of bookmarks that works well, perhaps they are better used independently for new links until the point where you find that the old folders have become redundant. I'm not even sure I like the most recent version of Firefox. Suddenly you have to click once to bookmark the link and then again to choose where to store it and how to tag it. Perhaps next week I'll explore another browser. For now I might even go back to IE6!