These days, if you want attentive customer service from most companies, the most direct route is to complain about the company on Twitter in such a way that your tweet shows up in the company’s mentions. It doesn’t matter whether your cable is working poorly, you had problems rebooking a flight, or your iPhone app didn’t work as well as you expected, Twitter is the place to seek relief.

This is a problem, mostly for the companies people are complaining about. They’re teaching their customers that the only way to get responsive customer service is to embarrass them publicly. What these companies fear most is that a complaint on Twitter will inspire an avalanche of “me too” retweets and responses that ultimately has a measurable negative impact on their business. That gives every customer who happens to be on Twitter the opportunity to be an amateur extortionist.

Here’s the thing, though. I don’t want to have to threaten a company to get decent customer service. If that’s what it takes, I don’t want to do business with the company at all. This is on my mind, of course, because there’s a company out there that I am having a bad customer service experience with, and I’m frustrated by the fact that griping about it on Twitter would almost certainly make it better.

What I’ve done instead is look at the company’s replies on Twitter to see what they suggest to other people who go to Twitter with their complaints, and follow those instructions. We’ll see how it works out.

There’s a debate raging over the news that mobile devices will soon be encrypted using keys that are fully under the owner’s control. The government, of course, hates this idea. Law enforcement feels like they should be able to decrypt anything if they want to. This is not a new debate — there was a huge debate over key escrow in the 90’s.

Here are a few pointers to pieces that explain why it’s important that users should be able to use encryption in the way that they see fit. Tim Bray concisely answers the question Is Encrypting Phones OK? Bruce Schneier explains that any back door put in place for law enforcement will inevitably be exploited by others (and links to a number of other good pieces on this topic). Cryptographer Matthew Green speculates on how Apple’s new security measures work.

I’m not usually a big fan of listicles, but I do recommend this one: Top 10 Ways To Be a Male Advocate for Technical Women, from the National Center for Women & Information Technology. What I particularly like about it is that it focuses on things that we can be doing right now to improve the professional prospects of women that we work with.

In Trouble at the Koolaid Point Kathy Sierra talks about her experience with online harassment, and more recently, the degree to which people are willing to forgive and forget the past misdeeds of her harassers. She also talks about the wide variety of pernicious lies that have been told about her that have reached such wide circulation that she can’t really shake them, and how those lies have been used to justify her harassment. This stuff happens all the time, to all kinds of people, especially women and other members of underrepresented groups online.