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Qwest Plan Stirs Protest Over Privacy
gilroy writes: "The New York Times has an article (free registration required) about customer reaction to a recent mailing by Qwest. Although the mailer only describes their privacy policy as it currently exists, apparently it's caught a few people by surprise." This hit David Farber's IP list a few days ago: see the original message or the follow-up. As Brett Glass accurately notes, most people believe that information about who they call is protected by law.
The United States Government is consitutionally unable to protect the privacy of individuals because of the countervailing property rights of other individuals --meaning corporations and the information they gather-- who have great influence over legislation (because of their sacred individual right to petition the government with their opinion$ and grievance$) and almost total control over public discourse.
According to spamcop, about 80% of the websites mentioned in my spam are hosted by Qwest.
I don't think this is a coincidence.
Unfortunately, this is becoming more of the norm than the exception anymore.
There has been a lot of deregulation that came down about two years ago... can anyone remember what bill this was that allowed subsidiary sharing?
Some other things you will soon notice... same newscast on different competing channels. Television stations can own more than one in any particular area.
Cable-television station-power and lights-commecial gas all in one companies. Many of you have seen this already if you live in Southern Indiana, where Vectren, the power company, controls services package for telephone, cable TV, broadband, power, and natural gas for your homes.
I have a friend that pays one bill a month. One huge, overpriced, amazingly illegal-until recently-deregulated bill.
By the way, the company was accused for decades of price gouging.
I found out about the mistake within a billing cycle, and called them up to have it changed. This operation was completely successful, but it did nothing to stem the tide of calls coming in from other parts of the country-- where apparently the local phone information was a long ways from its next five-year synchronization point.
Now imagine the wonderful mistakes that will occur when Qwest (the company known for its aggressive slamming practices and disastrous customer service) starts distributing that data.
What we need is some kind of clearing house of opt-out info, a la SpamCop, that would allow us to look up all the companies that we do business with and see what their real policies are. A nice feature would be the ability to generate legally binding letters of notification that we could send to those companies, preemptively opting out of all possible dissemination of our data.
Is this already available, or is someone working on it? If not, I'll get busy. Comments and suggestions welcome!
I called the number listed in the article to opt-out, and found it to be disconnected. Was the number transcribed wrong or is this further complication by Qwest? ;)
Yes, but that is really a secondary issue of can joe public understand it - this was simply a legal "cover our ass" manouver.
A caring company (or one who wants to seem caring and doesnt have any nasties lurking in their that their competitors dont) will spell it out nice, simple and in big print, like my insurance company chose to this year.
The problem here looks to be that they wish to start using those loopholes they left in the legal-ese the first time around so they can bring in extra revenue. Now to do this without getting ripped to shreds by the "i didnt know" crowd they are making it known that these are their terms which in some way or other all customers have accepted. That then leaves them cleanly covered as far as legal goes - "But judge honestly we told them all. Persons X, Y and Z chose not to opt-out like we said they could, so thats why we used their details".
Excuse me, but who in this world, except lawyers, has the knowledge to read and understand all those liscenses and terms. (And they probably don't have the time.)
These type of things are written to be obscure, misleading, and innocuous sounding. On top of that, the mass market consumer has very little negotiating power over these things. This differs greatly from 'real' contracts, like employment contracts and home mortgages.
I damned well took the time & energy to read and understand all those things when I bought my house, and feel good about it. Doing the same for every piece of software or service I purchase would be a waste of my finite lifetime.
Soooooo, what's the answer? There are laws regulating all types of contracts. These laws often include consumer rights that cannot be disclaimed or negotiated away. Laws that protect little old ladies from usury and such. Lobby the Gov to make similar laws for privacy.
AND post to slashdot or other populist web sites to educate the public about how bad these things are.
rbb
"Seriously, there should be a law that laws/EULAs/whaever come with a common English translation attached."
Management reasons why not:
1) You have to *honestly* and *fully* translate your existing legal-ese into everyday language. Your new document is not the summary guide - it is a legally binding document.
2) Do you know how many customers that would drive away if they really knew what was the deal was?
3) You don't get to hide details in the small print anymore.
I doubt that Qwest, before it swallowed US West, would have pulled this sort of crap. Too many customers would have defected. Unfortunately regional telcos like US West are government enforced monopolies. There's tons of legislation that allows them to exist, and even keeps out competition. So I appreciate your "no legislation is good legislation" sentiment, but until we actually embark on a plan to break these government-mandated monopolies and undo the effects of the existing system, we do need some decent legislation.
Some telcos would like to take advantage of the sort of anti-regulation paranoia evidenced in your reply to get Americans to accept the fucked-up deregulation plans they're buying in Congress. Sure, these companies are still monopolies, and they still love to take advantage of government regulation where it benefits them and prevents a true competitive environment. But if they play up the regulations they're opposed to, lots of otherwise intelligent Americans will resonate to the mindless "Government Regulation Is Bad" rhetoric they've grown up (sometimes rightly) believing. The telcos can then make a smooth transition from government-mandated, regulated monopolies to government-tolerated, unregulated monopolies without the pesky middle-step where competition is allowed to flourish.
No offense intended, but occasionally when somebody provides a more "detailed" argument: "government shouldn't regulate these companies, instead consumers should just boycott them", I actually do envision a bunch of righteous libertarians living in the hills. In little shacks with no electricity, no jobs or bank accounts, no phone service.
Without the legislation compelling these people to have a do not call list, without a system of rules to control their behavior, it becomes like email spam only live- and, as I've sometimes calculated for download and deletion of email spam, X% of my life is wasted responding to a telephone inquiry by a machine that hangs up on me. That X% is not a fixed number. There are a lot of people in the world dumb enough to think they can use shotgun methods to get business, and X% can be arbitrarily large, just as it can with email spam.
You cannot expect to hand people what is effectively a weapon and not expect them to use it. Whether it is spam or telemarketing, the concept is always 'we can force X number of people to interact with our annoyance mechanism if Y% of them end up buying from us'. The cost of this is the concern: if people could only bug you door-to-door, that puts a cap on how many of them any given marketer can employ. If they only have to use a phone, that expands their range of attack. If they only have to monitor a war-dialer in hopes it will weed out answering-machines and disconnected numbers, their range of attack expands still further. If they need only run a program to spam the Western World with 100 messages in everyone's mailbox- etc etc.
It is technology that sets up this situation, and in the absence of legislation it is an arms race that cannot be won. You can have your resources rendered USELESS by the actions of nothing more than marketers at a high enough intensity. I've put my phone on no-ring machine-only with the speaker volume all the way down, at times when I was being really hammered by telemarketwardialers. That's an attack on a resource that I pay for and 'own', just like it was a DOS on my webpage.
THAT is why we have legislation, and why we need the legislation to deal with this particular stuff. It's not even about 'privacy' for everybody, so much as it is about having our resources assaulted by machines, spam and similar technological innovations that can attack us more effectively than we can chase them off.
THAT is why we need legislation, foobar.
You hand the cashier the "bogus" discount card and then proceed to pay with your own credit card?
I find it ironic how much people complain about their personal privacy when they don't even realize how easy it is to track a great deal of things. Nor do people realize how long this has been possible.
The language here is quite clear and unambiguous. Regardless of whether or not the Bells can tie the FCC's rulemaking process up in the courts, the activities proposed by Qwest in its brochure are patently illegal.
... after all, we lock up individuals who do this sort of thing, usually applying the label "voyeur" or "peeping tom" so why should we be any less stringent with organized, by some definitions conspiratorial, violations of our privacy?)
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Perhaps it is time for private and/or class action lawsuits, or suits by state Attorneys General, to enforce the provisions of the law?
Perhaps it is time we started imprisoning CEOs and board members of companies that willfully break the law like this, counting on endless court battles and legal thuggary to allow them to gain the profits of their illegal actions before they can be compelled to adhere to the laws the rest of us are expected to abide by. As long as it is simply a numbers (financial) game one of the most important, and potent, deterrents against breaking the law will be rendered impotent, namely the consiquence of doing time for violating other people's rights. (Including the right to privacy
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy