All Telecom customers details revealed

The Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff, has announced she will investigate how Slingshot's marketing company Power Marketing obtained and used a sign-on code that allowed access to account details for every Telecom customer.

The NZ Herald reports that they had access to a "legitimate account used by a Telecom dealer to carry out its business"

There are at least dozens and possibly hundreds of Telecom dealers in New Zealand, just think of those little stands in malls. They are mostly small businesses and probably kept hungry by the competitive state of telecommunications in this country, I can imagine they probably go out of business reasonably often, or at least need to let staff go, so why on earth is Telecom letting them have full access to our private details?

As well as the impact on our privacy, this just doesn't seem to be a good business practice for Telecom. In short it seems sloppy.

Update (6:15 PM) Telecom says it is investigating the use of the database "If our investigation confirms unauthorised access we will pursue all appropriate action."" 

Waived insurance, got sick, complained

"A family who reported their son's chicken pox to Air New Zealand three days before they were due to fly believe they have been 'punished' with the extra costs involved in rebooking their travel. [Father] told the airline about the medical condition and was told his son could not board the flight.

Staff told him the booking fee could be reimbursed with a medical certificate, but he was quoted a price of over $500 to exchange his family's tickets for new ones."

NZ Herald

The Herald has been asking readers if the airline should have reinbursed the fare. Fortunately most of those who replied are far more sensible than the Herald and are firmly promoting the view that individual responsibility goes both ways.

As most of those I read have said, travel insurance is available for this type of event and the passengers chose not to buy insurance, thus deciding to carry the risk of illness / etc themselves.

When buying cheap fares for internal flights, I too usually decide that I'll carry the risk, for me it's a small risk and usually the cost of a replacement ticket is sufficiently small that I feel I'll come out ahead over time. When travelling internationally the potential charges are such that I see it as beneficial to have insurance so I buy it.

Although it's easy to say that Air New Zealand should refund the fare, if the airline decided to give them the benefits of having insurance without the customer having bought that insurance then others who also chose to carry the risk themselves could also request the same & eventually the costs of the insurance plus a profit margin for the airline would be loaded as an extra charge onto every ticket we bought.

2011 Prediction - Freedom of the press and the internet

Freedom of the press was never about allowing anyone to publish, it was about allowing the middle class (who were the ones rich enough to own presses) the right to publish. The USA revolution was a middle class revolution and it was to allow competing voices within the ruling class to be heard.

There's a long history of using pretexts and excuses for suppressing freedom of expression in Democracies (Dictatorships don't need excuses). Advertising has also been a control mechanism ... offend a powerful group and your advertising dries up making it hard to run those expensive presses.

As they slowly wake up to the fact that the Internet allows ordinary people to say what they want to as large an audience as they can attract power slips slowly away from the communications media owned by the ruling classes. With publication so cheap, the advertising lever is no longer as effective.  The Internet has reached the point where it is starting to scare the ruling classes and they are finding pretexts to "regulate" it. Wikileaks, Whale Blubber's vigilante blog, etc give high profile whipping boys and I expect them to find more pretexts like these in 2011 to push for a more highly regulated Internet.