There is an EV charging station just opened near our house in Ealing. I am bemused by the way they are going about doing this. I mean I can buy a railway ticket, or pay for petrol for my car just by tapping a machine with my credit card. But to pay for a charge to your EV you have to go through a grotesque procedure that involved giving the supplier a lot of personal information for no obvious reason. Click on the thumbnail on the right to see the full set of instructions.
The procedure involves either: (please stay with me, this is complicated).
- Use their own “Source London” charge card.
- Use your credit card. Which entails:
- Scan a QR Code. If you want to check out the web form the QR code is on the right. click on the thumbnail for a bigger version.
- On the web page, log in with your account or
- Continue without an account which involves:
- Giving your name, address, email, phone number
- Ticking a box that you have read their tracking cookies charter
- Ticking box that you accept their terms and conditions
- Unticking a couple of boxes assuming you don’t want their spam. (unticking – what happened to GDPR?)
- Then you get to give them them your credit card details
So to charge your car, unlike buying some petrol or a train ticket, you have to have at some point had to provide a whole lot of person information. Not to mention having to go through this impenetrable web site on a wet Saturday.
This is literally just buy fuel for your car. I think this is outrageous as well as hopelessly bad marketing. What astonishes me is that the Government, and Ealing council have allowed this infringement on our privacy for what is a monopoly in our area for essential commodity for EV car owners.
These guys are only n London. What are visitors from out of town supposed to do. Go through this whole procedure for one refuelling?
Bob Browning's blog 
Isn’t this procedure intentionally designed to encourage users to use a “Source London” card
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