honestly, this is brilliant. Not only is it going to make it easier to understand people with really thick accents – I’ve worked with lots of Indian people before (hotel industry) and I still get tripped up from time to time, especially over a crappy phone line – but it’ll also probably cut down on a lot of the racist shit they may take from customers. I can imagine the average call center employee with a thick accent takes a fair bit more abuse than call center employees who speak without an accent.
on the other hand, this might also make it harder to identify a scam call immediately if this becomes commonplace. Not that perfect English speakers aren’t also capable of scamming you, but, usually the scam callers aren’t perfect English speakers.
not at all arguing this is okay, not even a little
but
If you are the French government, and you know what the French populace has a history of doing to the French government, it would be understandable to want to keep your eye on them, no?
again. It ain’t cool. But I’m honestly surprised they didn’t hop on the “intrusive surveillance” bandwagon sooner, like, as soon as mass surveillance became feasible, and have the privacy laws they do.