Did Your Ex-ISP Purge Your Personal Data?

reallocate asks: "When you quit an ISP, do you expect that your personal info and your email accounts will be purged? So did I, but I was wrong. Do you know what your ISP does with your data if you quit them?" At first glance, this would seem to be a reasonable expectation, but these days, businesses are holding your data longer than you'd expect. If someone doesn't know for sure if an old business is holding their personal data, is there any way they can find out? "Once upon a time, I was a Roadrunner customer. I dropped them and moved to another ISP. A few days ago, I fell prey to a "returning customer" inducement from Roadrunner that will, in truth, save me a few hundred dollars over the course of a year.

However, when the sales agent knew my address before I gave it to her, and the customer service guy I called later knew my Social Security number, although I had not yet provided it, it was clear Roadrunner had not purged my data when I had closed the old account, including user ID and password. Their agents were seeing that data displayed on their screens. And, checking what I thought were long-dead Roadrunner email accounts, I saw they'd been left open and active, with hundreds of messages piling up.

I've spoken with my local Roadrunner office and written their national office, asking about their policy on purging personal data when a customer drops an account, and, if it isn't purged, how they use that data. To be fair, both queries were made over the weekend and I'm waiting for responses."

Comments

Re:Is this guy serious?

[DaveJay]

Agreed about the email. Parent mentioned not expecting a bank to purge your information, but you would certainly expect them to close your active checking and savings accounts (or in an ISP's case, email accounts).

I had a terrible, terrible bank in Chicago some years back, and when I closed all the accounts and took the last of my money out (in person, I might add) they assured me that the account was closed.

Well, a check that was still floating around hit the bank a week later (it was months old and very small, so I had chalked it up to a balancing error) and rather than not pay it or contact me first, they paid it out, then sent me a bill for the overdraft charge in addition to the amount. The kicker: I tried to talk to them about it, but all I got were circles of:

them: "we only honor checks to open accounts, and yours is closed, so we couldn't have paid it"

me: "but you sent me this overdraft for the closed account saying you paid this out"

them: "well, the account must not have been closed"

me: "I have this piece of paper from you saying it was closed a week before this check was paid"

them: "if you had a check out there, you should have left enough money in the account to cover it"

me: "I didn't know it was still out there, and how can I leave money in a closed account?"

them: "You can't leave money in a closed account, but once an account is closed, you don't need to leave money, because we don't honor checks to closed account"

me: "but you DID..."

And so on. Took weeks to straighten out. Bluh.

It costs them nothing

[jm92956n]

A while back (nearly six years ago, to be exact), I cancelled service with my local ISP. Though they deleted my email account, my FTP account was not touched. I still use it on a regular basis to host files. According to Netcraft the server is running WebSTAR/4.2, some old ancient Mac software that I've never seen elsewhere. I'm convinced my account will remain until there's a hardware failure.

There's little to no cost associated with maintaining this data. It would probably cost them more in man-hours to delete my account than it would to just leave the account in place.