I take invasion of privacy very seriously indeed, and use all available measures to prevent it happening to me.

Sometimes this means sacrifice on my part, for if I refuse to impart a piece of personal information to some request from an Internet entity, I may well be excluded from certain functions. So be it. I can live without them!

Furthermore, with a little ingenuity, there are usually workarounds that enable me to do most of what I want, and how I want it, instead of having to acquiesce to demands that are just not reasonable.

Imagine my surprise when I found that I was having problems of this nature with WordPress!

I had signed up for the Zero to Hero challenge, (which was actually a mistake, as I wanted the other one, but there was a cock-up with their forms), and patiently waited for information to arrive in my In-box.

It got there soon enough, and I immediately set to work. A section of WordPress.com has been set aside for this purpose, and can be accessed at 101april2014.wordpress.com.

However, what they didn’t tell me at the start was that to access this section, I needed to enable 2-step Authentication. If I had known that at the outset, I would not have bothered to register for the challenge.

IMPASSE

I absolutely refuse to give my telephone number out to people on the Internet.

• That is Private.
• That is Personal.
• That enables Direct Access.
• That is nobody else’s business unless I decide otherwise!

2-step Authentication, assuming that it is at all necessary, (and I am by no means convinced of this), can be done perfectly well using an alternate email address. Other people use that system, and it is one that I am willing to sign up for, albeit grudgingly.

I looked for somewhere to complain about the problem, but WordPress has this well-covered. Forums, comments,(when open), yes – but an email address to send a complaint to?

Not for the unwashed!

If you have paid for an account, the situation is apparently somewhat better.

Oh well, it looks as if I will remain a Zero after all!

And yes, WordPress, consider yourself reprimanded!