Verizon Wireless Opt-Out Plan For Customer Records
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I thought I’d pass this along to my friends and family that use Verizon. They are going to sell all of your call records unless you ask them not to. Please call and ask them not to. I hope you get angry and dump them all together. More and more I wonder if there are any good mobile phone companies out there. Besides this absurd breach of your privacy, Versizon has recently attacked Vonage with frivolous patent claims. A good company like Vonage is getting squeezed out of a competitive market by Verizon. How does this type of capitalism benefit the consumer? The same way selling all of your call data does. Negatively!
Check out this post on Slashdot and get your personal data out before it gets sold!
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.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
You Should Read This Now!
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Wanna Vote? Say goodbye to privacy!
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I hate junk mail! To me junk mail is any commercial mail I did not request. I don’t want polls, offers, PSA’s, and don’t even get me started with credit card offers, mortgage companies, and ads.
Today I received a mailer from Discovery Gateway. I’m sure I voted to fund them in 2002, and walked by the other day at the Gateway. It sounds like a great organization, and looked fun, but I still don’t want their mass mailings.
This mailing was especially disturbing because it not only had the address of the place where I rent, but also my PO Box. I don’t give my physical address out to anyone. Eventually I’m going to move and don’t want all my junk coming to my roommate for years to come. I also am very cautious about who gets my PO Box. The whole purpose of the box was to control who gets my info. Foiled again! When the mailer arrived with both addresses in the “To:” field, I was very disturbed.
I called Discovery Gateway and left a message. I was called back almost immediately and given the scary news that the list they used was purchased from the State. Thanks to Jen and DG for being open and helping me sort this out!! Apparently for $1000 you can by the State Voter Information list. Is nothing sacred? This is like when I bought first my house and the first piece of mail I received had the amount of my loan in it. Oh yeah, that information is publicly available too!
Welcome to Utah. Your right to vote is prostituted! I have a call in to get my name removed and to complain. Stay tuned to see if my right to vote will be held hostage by the state government’s greed…
Update 9/26/06: No word back from my friends at the State. I’m in Brazil now and will need to wait until I get back to figure this all out.
