Finance, Forex and Investments

Should companies that outsource their services be made to be more transparent?

A company selling a product made overseas is required to declare where it has been made, e.g. 'Made in Japan'. Should not a bank or insurance company or ISP or hospital that outsources vital services, such as the storage of your financial and biometric details, be made to declare where they are doing this, e.g. 'Serviced from, and data stored in, India', so that customers can make an informed decision whether to allow this to be done to their data? At the moment, you can buy your insurance from a company unaware that all your data would be stored in a foreign country where it could be viewed and copied and sold quite easily. In many developing countries such as India, data security is relatively lax and you can buy online data of UK customers, including their card details and pin numbers. We should have the information to make informed decisions whether to allow our data to be outsourced like that.

Public Comments

1. Yes I agree, Its just another example of our government putting Britain's in danger to benefit big business and foreign nationals. When will they ever learn.
2. Most certainly they should. The worse case of outsourcing is not in the private sector but in the public sector, in particular the NHS which many years ago outsourced it's cleaning services. Result, hospitals are now filthy and MRSA is killing more patients than the illnesses they were admitted for in the first place. Lesley Ashe has won a major battle in the courts and will be compensated massively for lost earning for her years of suffering and disability due to contracting MRSA in one of our filthy NHS hospitals. The same thing happened when the British Rail was privatized. Nothing wrong with that, but what was wrong was allowing Rail-Track [Fail-Track] to outsource all repairs to the PW [permanent way]. PW staff who fixed things on a daily basis by walking the track, were hacked back to less than half of their original strength. What happened? Lots of crashes caused by people working on track maintenance who had no previous knowledge or experience of same. The London Underground is a mess because UK.gov wants to make profit from it to stuff the pockets of favoured business associates. Whole work days are being lost to London businesses because of Tube work delays and staff being unable to get to work on time. Outsoursing is not always a good idea and in most cases it seems entirely wrong. It's time to tighten up. If a car is simply bolted together here in UK then it should not be allowed to bear the stamp of approval and be called UK-made which it is not. This is how the Japs and everyone else outside EU get their crap products onto our supposed protected markets. The EU is supposed to be there for the benefit of EU products and not those made outside. This is why workers in Germany and France and Italy and UK and everywhere else in the EU are laid off in their thousands, because some prat wants to move outside the EU make the product in kit form and then have unskilled lowpaid immigrant workers spanner the lot together and call it EU made. Time to do something about this corrupt nonsense. Screw them hard till it hurts.
3. It seems sensitive data is being lost, stolen, dumped in a skip or left on the seat of a car in the memory bank of a laptop or the like all too often here in the UK these days (and that is only what has been reported). And you reckon there's danger it could get even worse? Well Lord help us.
4. Whilst I appreciate your concerns, with regards to insurance it is a requirement under FSA regulations that the name and contact details of an insurance company be provided in any insurance policy. (You would be surprised at which companies provide cover for 'Tesco', 'Asda' etc) Regrettably most people don't bother with the name, location or reputation of the insurance company - as long as the premium is the cheapest available.