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Canadian Cable Company Shames Non-Paying Customers Publicly On Facebook (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: If you've ever been late on paying a bill, it's unlikely that you ever thought that you were running the risk of being publicly shamed about your shortcomings. However, for a few unfortunate individuals, one Canadian cable TV provider doesn't see things quite the same way. Recently, Senga Services, which is located in Canada's Northwest Territories, decided to begin posting the names of customers that had overdue payments to its Facebook page. The initiative was spearheaded by company employee Jennifer Simons, who felt so strongly about her right to expose late bill payers, that she debated with those on a Facebook community page who thought she was in the wrong in doing so. Simons claims that public shaming has proven to be the most successful method of getting customers to pay up. Exposing someone's name and amount owed might be a gross breach of ethics, but Simons claims that it's not illegal. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada urged the company to pull the post outing these tardy customers, and the company has since obliged. The Privacy Commissioner is now mulling whether this issue is worth investigating further.
I predict we see an article on slashdot in about two months, telling us how many customers ended their contract with said company.
My guess is 2%.
Am I the only one who thinks it's wrong to shame people as a form of punishment?
I guess the privacy laws are much more lax in Canada.
Here in Norway you can't even say publicly who is a customer.
Isn't the problem already handled by charging interest? Did they calculate whether in the long run they make more profit from these people? This is certainly the case for credit card companies.
How about "Here's a list of our best customers, thank you for paying late" ?
Is going to be a big f*cking lawsuit.
Lookup who lives in the Northwest Territories and you will then understand why the "Privacy Commissionner" i.e. an overpaid governement parasite is involved...
I don't know if it helped recover any money from the deadbeats, but I recall pretty much everyone looking to see if they recognized any of the names.
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Ernest Hemingway
Enquiring minds want to know
That works on behalf of consumers? how novel
The privacy commissioner? You mean, the one that has no legal power to do anything, and only has the power of shaming corporations publicly (about not following toothless privacy "suggestions" in our law)?
The privacy commissioner has no ability to force behaviour change, no ability to fine, no ability to charge anyone with a crime.
They rely on shaming, ffs!
And, of course, only doing so in the most public of cases. The privacy commissioner doesn't actually *do* anything about cases involving smaller issues with companies.
What a useless office. What a waste of tax money.
They either need more power, or to be scrapped.
If this is satire, it is too subtle for me.
I predict that this employee will not be working for the company soon. I mean, what could possibly go wrong....... teehee
Seriously, how is this better than simply disconnecting or throttling down to say, 256 kbps (with perhaps intermittent redirects to pay-your-bill reminder pages) until the bill is paid? It shows more respect to customers. Is there a law in Canada that disallows this by classification as an essential service?
Hmmm . . . will banks in Canada start doing this with folks who have loans that are in arrears . . . ?
Oh, no! Imagine if the EU Eurozone did this for Greece ?!?!
There are ~10 million people in Greece who owe them money, so that would be a gargantuan list!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Nobody should ever have to pay a cent just watch TV. In the end all you do is pay them to force feed you commercials. And the idea that any broadcaster expects to be paid to have their advertising delivered to cable subscribers is absolutely absurd. The more viewers you have, the more you can charge for your ads. Why in the world would you expect a company that delivers more viewers to pay you to do so? Logic would dictate that cable and satellite companies should be being paid for bringing in more viewers. The very idea that they should pay to broadcast any ad laden offerings is actually quite sickening.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Yelp and Trip Advisor are occasional targets of lawsuits by unhappy businesses. But the businesses have to prove both falsehood and harm and tend to lose most of these suits.
Do they also shame any of their own salesmen caught telling a lie to a potential customer, any support person having been unable to help a customer with something they should have been able to and all technical staff whenever there's an issue with the service?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
We should publicly shame the cable companies for charging over $250 for the $99 plan. We should shame them for upcharging us for "commercial free" content, and then adding commercials. We should shame them for increasing the cost of cable TV from $20 including Pay Channels in the 1980s to over $250 including pay channels to day, outpacing inflation almost as fast as healthcare and education.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Why anyone would in the future want to be associated or paying customers of a company that behaves is such an uncivilized, childish and unprofessional manner is beyond me. These were your customers.... I am all but lost for words Do you think they will think kindly of you in the future ? Do you think they in any way are going to stay loyal to you and your brutish ways ? The fact that the person spearheading the initiative has not been canned immediately after this insane breach of trust is unbelievable. The fact that The Privacy Commissioner is now only mulling whether this issue is worth investigating further, is beyond belief, the company should be heavily sanctioned to the furthest extent of the law and then some this is completely unacceptable behavior. The company employee Jennifer Simons and her company should be electronically hung out to dry publicly, every nitty gritty detail of their existence made available for scrutiny for future generations because this is in essence what she has done to these people. And the company removing the information - Too late - the internet does not forget. The fact that someone is late in payments or in breach of contract does not give you the right to breach the privacy of your relationship and if the small print actually says you may hang said people out to dry by publishing their information and situation publicly and that is allowable within the framework of contract law then I believe a few companies should be shaking in their pants right now as they risk being next to such blackmail tactics and we are talking big companies. Jennifer Simmonds - I have to say shame on you for doing this and shame on your employer for going along on such a scheme.
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
Yeah, seeing my name on a Facebook shaming ad would definitely make me pay....NOT!
I'd call up, cancel my service, and also let them know that I'll be posting my own version of Facebook shaming ads, featuring them and their toxic, anti-customer attitude. And I bet mine would get waaaaaaaaaaaay more visibility than theirs would.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
If this is satire, it is too subtle for me.
I'm pretty sure it is. And very well done.
So, when has this ever worked when we tried to shame any of our favorite ISPs here? Oh right, it never made a difference.
In my experience, people do not respect cable companies enough to be ashamed at being late paying them.
Let's put aside the whole idea that a bad debt is between the debtor and the debtee and not really anyone else's business. Not even going to bother with that except in what's already stated.
When you post something on the Internet, you no longer control the information. The person that you've just outed as a bad debtor is potentially now and forever a bad debtor, regardless of how quickly they've paid up. There are any number of ways that a third party can capture that information and repost it, keeping it alive until the end of the internet, most of them automatically and without any malice, directed or otherwise.
Furthermore, names are not unique, unless you have some super-odd combination of letters, foreign and domestic. It is then very easy for one slightly malicious person to remove one piece of contextual information and suddenly, everyone named Bill Smith is now guilty of debt evasion. It's actually easy enough for someone to overlook that same information with the same results. The internet can be, at times, one giant game of telephone.
Lastly, once published, the publisher of that information has no control over how others will react to the information. How difficult would it be for someone to claim to be a debt collector and go shake down the bad debtors for money? Depending on where the incident occurred, not very. How difficult would it be for one slightly unbalanced individual to decide that those bad debtors were the reason they had to pay more? Not at all - happens every day.
There is one upside to posting debtor information - the company posting it gets paid. There are no upsides and only downsides to everyone else involved.
i swear, it's like they were trying to invite the wrath of Anonymous to fall upon their servers.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Assholery like this only thrives in the absence of competition.
No, it's just "tardy".
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
and efficiency. This looks to me like some middle manager's desperate attempt to meet an arbitrary metric to make their bonus that year. I could get angry at that but from what I can tell Canada is starting to have the sort of wage stagnation that the US has had for the last 40 years or so. You'll see more and more of this as companies use metrics to wring every last dime out of their workers while pitting them against other workers on the global stage. I know a lot of people who complain about how inefficient gov't and businesses are, but I don't think anyone every really considers the consequences of real efficiency...
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For as many times as Comcast have outright lied to me over the phone, not shown up for appointments, failed to credit my account when promised, and over-billed me in error if they ever tried to publicly shame me I'd laugh in their face and ignore it just as they laugh and ignore me because of the monopoly they have.
If you endorse public shaming it's only a matter of time before the elite begin to use it too.
I wonder how the cable company will feel when it's suppliers start to "name and shame" it for outstanding invoices?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I'm guessing she's going to get a very hard lesson in how internet justice works.
It is illegal. Canada's privacy law explicitly allows organizations to use or disclose people's personal information only for the purpose for which they gave consent. If the list hasn't been taken down yet, it will be shortly, if anyone on it files a complaint with Canada's privacy commissioner.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Just cut them off. The shame of not being able to discuss the latest episode of That's My Elk with their neighbours is more than punishment enough.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
My guess is that the employee that decided this was a good idea did not contact their legal department:
Canadian provinces, much like US states, have some pretty robust debt collection laws.
For the NWT specifically: https://www.justice.gov.nt.ca/en/legislation/#gn-filebrowse-0:/c/consumer-protection/
(2) Collection agencies and collectors shall not engage in any prohibited practice in the collection of debts. S.N.W.T. 2003,c.2,s.11.
And regulations:
5. No collection agency and no collector acting for a collection agency shall contact any member of the debtor’s family or household, or any relative, neighbour, friend or acquaintance of the debtor, in respect of the debt or collection of the debt, unless
(a) the collection agency does not have the debtor’s address or telephone number and the contact is for the purpose of obtaining the debtor’s address or telephone number;
(b) the individual contacted has guaranteed to pay the debt and is being contacted in respect of the guarantee; or
(c) the debtor has, in writing, requested that the collection agency or collector contact the individual and the individual does not object to the contact.
7. (1) No collection agency and no collector shall communicate or attempt to communicate with a debtor or with any member of the debtor’s family or household, any relative, neighbour, friend or acquaintance of the debtor, or the debtor’s employer
(a) insuchamanner,
(b) withsuchfrequency,
(c) usingsuchmeans,or
(d) usingcontentofsuchanature,
as to constitute harassment of the debtor or the individual contacted.
(2) For the purpose of subsection (1), examples of communication that constitute harassment include the following:
(a) the use of threatening, profane, intimidating or coercive language;
(b) the use of undue, excessive or unreasonable pressure;
(c) a threat to publish the debtor’s failure to pay a debt;
(d) the publication of the debtor’s failure to pay a debt.
8. Except on the request of the individual being contacted, no collection agency and
Methinks they just cost more money that they were owed.
Nothing might be technically illegal about posting names of non-paying customers, assuming the list of names is correct. But cable companies are notoriously bad at keeping accounts in order themselves, and the moment they try the name-and-shame on someone who actually is a paying customer, they'll be on the hook for libel.
Should do this.
Hey deadbeats- Fuck you.
You're too late!
I guess the privacy laws are much more lax in Canada.
Here in Norway you can't even say publicly who is a customer.
In the United States we don't even have a privacy commissioner. In Canada they had the federal one and state commissioners.
There are only a few reasons we have any privacy at all. For example, companies not wanting to risk losing business. Also, any time a big company has a data breach, a few lawyers sue them in a class action.
It turns out neither of these has consequences serious enough to be especially helpful to the average consumer.
At one point my phone company thought I had missed a payment. After a long dispute they finally admitted that they had made a mistake and that nothing was owed. If they had publicly slandered incorrectly for failing to pay my debts, they would have been facing a large lawsuit.
This seems like an extremely unwise approach for a company.
It's been shown time and again that kicking network execs teeth in has been very efficient in convincing them some practices are despicable. Think we should employ it, Mrs. Simons?
Deadbeats around the world appreciate your passionate support and threats of violence on their behalf. Are you joining in support of your fellow deadbeats or are you merely mentally defective?
It's cable tv, not something important like water or electricity. Late paying? Service is turned off until your account it up to date.
How farking hard is that?
is what allowed that bitch to get away with that shit. In a place like that it is not teeming with providers. Hope some of those people get together and kick her ass.
Wow your always on the wrong side of things.
Your not only supporting thieves but violently supporting them. If you did some contract work and the company or individual did not pay you what they promised, you don't think you'd have the right to complain about that in public?
Is it classy? No, but honestly I dont get into situations where I don't pay my bills, so I don't really empathize with deadbeats. In america, maybe that's harder to do because you don't have state sponsored health care, but this is canada we are talking about.
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This is how normal small town collections work in rural / small town Canada.
Enter many small convenience store, gas station, body shop etc. and see the wall of shame - customers that do not pay. No idea if it works but it has been there for forty years at least and likely long before that. With video monitoring sometimes you get stills as well as names and amounts owed but the old school still exists.
There are also small town message boards of various stripes where this happens. You just haven't been paying attention; it was a bit ballsy to put it on something mainstream like Facebook but inevitable and almost certainly not unique.
Maybe cable companies learned from all those 'comcastsucks' websites that rail against cable companies they figured turn-about is fair-play... They don't pay their bill, cut service. If cutting service isn't an option, publicly shame them... Can't afford your cable bill and don't want to be shamed? Cancel cable service and work out a payment schedule for any outstanding balance.
You never had your bank blunder and not transfer funds on time? Or, worse, even grant a company the right to simply withdraw their amount due and them being for some odd reason not only don't do it but also blame you for it? Never? Lucky you.
Adding this kind of public shaming on top of the troubles would probably just be the icing on the shit cake.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.