personalization

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Some paranoid folks think that personalization techniques are a bad thing, e.g.,

• the use of web cookies to allow a website to remember something about you.

• Google Gmail scanning your email to provide advertisements relevant to you.

I like the above very much. They save me time, get irrelevant stuff away from me, and put potentionally relevant stuff in front of me.

Here are some other personalization techniques I would like to see:

• Press 1 for English. Don't you hate when every IVR Phone System takes the time to ask you this? I would like to have an opt-in system where a caller could register their phone numbers and their preferred language, so an IVR system could quickly look me up by Caller ID and then speak to me in my preferred language, without asking me to choose it each time.

• Please enter your zip code. I would be happy to tell my Internet browser my zip code, and then have a convention where any site who needs my zip code would ask in a standard way so my browser could give them my zip code without asking me, or ask me each time, as I prefer.