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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.
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
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?
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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.
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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...
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.
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.
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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Except that a bad debt is a problem for the community in a few ways. First, everyone else in the community must pay that debt for the ISP to continue tomdonthings like buy bandwidth and repair lines. Further, others in the community do business with that person and should have an honest understanding of how creditworthy they are. Decades ago in a small town in Appalachia, some people were great customers but they had to pay with cash up front. Some were terrible customers but were given a line of credit. We were poor but proud so we asked if they had any work they needed done if we didn't have cash. It put a squeeze on us, and a hard squeeze on people who wouldn't get a line, but it would have been very expensive to everyone if the grocery store went out of business and we had to go 15 miles further to get groceries.
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.
People don't understand that these fabulously wealthy, evil, greedy companies in well-established industries run at a small profit margin. If it is 10%, say, then if 1 of 10 customers doesn't pay, there it all goes down the tube. There isn't as much waking around money to cover it as imagined.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
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.
If I later hear about this woman being doxxed, or publically shamed because it turns out there are skeletons in HER closet, or nude pics get posted or something like that, I won't be the least bit surprised. Judge be not lest ye be judged. I hope it doesn't happen but I'll have no sympathy if it does.
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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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.
Assholery like this only thrives in the absence of competition.
Yes, I'm sure this company's potential competitors would be really keen to take on a raft of non-paying new customers.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it