Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Wireless Opt-Out Plan For Customer Records
An anonymous reader writes to let us know that Verizon Wireless is planning to share its customers' calling records (called CPNI) with "our affiliates, agents and parent companies (including Vodafone) and their subsidiaries." The article explains that CPNI "includes the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and time spent on each call, among other data." Some subscribers, it's not known if it's all of them, received a letter in the mail giving them 30 days to opt out of this sharing by calling 1-800-333-9956. Skydeck, a mobile and wireless services company, seems to have been the first to call attention to the Verizon initiative on their blog; they also posted a scan of the letter (sideways PDF) from Verizon.
When I hear things like that I always wonder how they handle past customer data. Those folks are not being given any "opt out" provision. Same as when companies get bought or sold off for parts. Current customers of course are respected since they have value but past customers are only worth the data you can mine out of them.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's just evil that they make you do it at all.
023AD01("Child", "Evil");
...of corporate (a)merica truly getting out of hand.
This scenario is much like a criminal going to commit a crime no matter what, but he won't if you get his letter in the mail and then take steps and waste your time to tell him not too. Just so many things wrong with this story, but unfortunately not shocking and of course NO ONE will do anything to stop this trend in the country other than bitch and moan.
Saves you from having to enter your SSN every time.
I haven't called, but I'm gathering from you that they ask you to enter it once? They send a piece of mail (with their logo on it, so you know it's really them) to you asking you to call a number that could be anyone and ask you to enter your social security number? Thanks, Verizon, for making identity theft even easier.
A clue ?
"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!" -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa
It doesn't matter how easy it is, that's not the point. In pretty much every western country, except for the US, this would be totally illegal. It amazes me how Americans seem (on the whole) totally content with not having any data protection laws.
Corporations, like governments, are amoral by definition. Opt-in would require business ethic, of which Verizon has repeatedly shown it has little. To be fair, the same applies to AT&T/SBC, Comcast, AOL, and any of the other big boys.
The people who consume the goods and services provided by the likes of Verizon have become less important than the companies willing to pay to mine customer databases. There's a lot of money in that, which means quality-of-service levels (and corresponding expenses) can be reduced while maintaining profitability. If that kind of information-sharing were simply illegal, perhaps our communications providers would have to get back to worrying themselves about what their customers want.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
something else? I'd think that a corporation helping its government spy illegally is bad. If the spying is done in a legal, constitutional way, with a judge overseeing the procedures, I don't think most people would object.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
The government breaking the law and private citizens breaking the law are radically different things. The government is an artificial structure defined by the law - if it breaks that law, then it can no longer be trusted to serve it's intended purpose rather than some unwanted purpose. And when a government is serving unwanted and unintended purposes that's a very bad thing.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
This is why I find it important to distinguish from consumer and customer. The customer is always right. The consumer is just a resource. Problem is, we are the consumer. The corporation on the other end of the data-mining business is the customer.
[
The U.S. system seems screwy for text messages, but it makes sense for voice calls. The caller pays for the cost of the call on the POTS system to whatever exchange the cellular number is in. Then the person with the cellphone pays for the airtime to transmit that call over the cellular network to their handset. (And they pay for the airtime whether the call is outgoing or incoming; what they're paying for is the circuit, not really the 'call.') This means, if the call originates from the same area that the cellphone's number is in, the caller pays next to nothing, since it's a local call. In fact, they have no way of knowing, just by looking at the number, whether it's a cell or landline. There's no difference in the U.S. between a "cellular number" and a "regular number."
It doesn't strike me as illogical. If it cost people more to call cellphones than landlines, the uptake of cellphones would have been a lot slower. I certainly wouldn't be able to use a cellphone as my primary business line, since it would be obnoxious to charge people more (and, hence, discourage them from calling me) because I want the ability to take calls on the road.
The U.S. pricing structure means that text messages are a bad deal (which is why they're little used here compared to in Europe), but it also sped the adoption of cell phones to many people who wouldn't have bought them otherwise, particularly business users, and it prevented people from consciously avoiding making calls to cell phones because of the expense. It puts the expense of owning a cellphone on the person who wants the convenience of being mobile, rather than on the caller.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."