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The Consumerist today has a surprising article about an instance where a rebate company has been caught with over 1300 rebate claims thrown, unopened, into the dumpster.

Rebates are a system that is easy to abuse. Avoid them if you can.

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First he refused to show his reciept and the Circuit City people blocked his car. Then when he called for the police and they asked for his driver's license, he refused and was arrested.

I'm going to try and follow this case because this guy says there's no law requiring that he show his reciept and also no law requiring that he present ID to the officer. If that's true, I hope he sues both Circuit City and the police station for all their worth. People who abuse consumers and citizens merely because of their ignorance of their rights is one of the main reasons I began this website.

Oh, and in case you don't see the problem, check out this nicely put comment from Slashdot.org:

That bag contained his private property that he had just purchased. He gave them money for it, it's his, not theirs.

Should he be able to inspect their cash registers after his purchase? After all, they contain money that was his just moments before.

Would you feel differently about the privacy implications if he were leaving Wal*Mart and had just filled his prescription for an STD, or to prevent his frequent diarrhea? Pharmacists are licensed professionals, trained on the privacy aspects of their profession. You're saying that I should have to expose my medical condition to any minimum-wage flunkie who gets curious?

Go Michael, go!

Update 9/5/2007

He'll continue to update his blog with information on the case. Today's entry included this quote:

You don’t have to stand in front of a tank or refuse to move to the back of the bus to make a difference in the world.

Well said.

Update 9/20/2007

He WON! Sort of.

Gift Cards - Use with care

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Rebates (which are a scam to begin with in most cases) are now being returned as gift cards. Not only does this force you to spend the money back at the store, but they come with all the nastiness that gift cards do. Things like fees, expiration dates, etc.

Data brokering needs to be curbed, and fast.

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According to Computer World, we could be getting some strong privacy protections similar to what the European Union has now.

From the EU's privacy directive:

Only the minimum personal data needed should be collected, and it should be retained for the minimum time necessary. ... The subject has the right to know whom is keeping and accessing their personal data, and the right to examine the data and to have the data removed or changed.

Those would go a long way towards ending data brokering issues.

AT&T

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AT&T (a.k.a the evil empire that won't die), is going to start filtering Internet traffic to remove copyrighted material in transit.

Fortunately, there's no chance this will work for long. First there's the SET technology for filesharing that uses generic chunks from files unrelated to copyrighted material to speed up sharing. If this gets implemented, not only will it improve filesharing speeds and allow people to finish files that have lost their seeders/sources, but it will prevent AT&T from filtering copyrighted material without blocking legitimate shares as well.

Secondly, it won't be long until filesharing networks introduce a quick encryption to packets that scramble them randomly using an IP address so the chunks of data won't be recognized by AT&T filters. I'm sure there are plenty of other techniques as well, but one thing's for certain: even honest non-hackers and non-sharers are still rooting against the copyright holders and AT&T.

I mean, come on! The article says the copyright companies lost billions of dollars due to filesharing? All they're doing is talking about the value of the files they know have been shared without taking into account that many of the people who are downloading these files would never have bought them in the first place! They're not losing money they would have had, they're losing money they never would have had.

As the article itself says, the RIAA and MPAA should just focus their money and resources in finding ways to turn downloaders into honest customers (perhaps cutting prices? Offering slick downloadable options? Removing all DRM so people can do what they want with it?)

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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This is pretty funny. First it was going to be 24 months and now they've changed it to 18. However, they want to "firmly reject any suggestions that we could meet our legitimate interests in security, innovation and anti-fraud efforts with any retention period shorter than 18 months".

They probably bent to pressure from many organizations including Privacy International who named Google the worst privacy offender of all (they were the only one to receive the ''black'' rating).

Google, not surprisingly, has challenged stating that Privacy International's report was based on misunderstandings of their services and policies. I'm not convinced.

So they "firmly reject" the idea that they could meet their interests with data less than 18 months? What interests could they possibly have with all your personal information tied to your search history other than selling your data? I'd like to hear that answer.

I went to their blog site and read their post on the topic. They state that they need search history data to refine their services (duh), but what does that have to do with linking it to individuals?

Debt neverending

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Some people still get on my case for being such a strong proponent of business regulation. They think that because of that, I don't put enough of the blame on the consumer (who is obviously at fault for the trouble the get themselves into). However, it's clear that the playing field is not level, the businesses use tricks and manipulations that no normal person has a chance against.

You don't even have to do anything wrong in some cases. Consumeraffairs.com looks at how the credit industry is still as full of abuses as before the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act was passed in 1977.

"Even more startling, debt buyers have learned to work the system to win judgments and coerce payments even when they have the wrong person or lack any evidence that the consumer owes the debt," NCLC and NACA wrote in a filing with the Federal Trade Commission.

…

"Debts that may be a decade or more old are now sold in bundles to debt buyers for pennies on the dollar. Debt buyers then file cases by the thousands in overworked courts. The courts typically enter default judgments even if the collector has no proof that the consumer owed the debt, that the amount owed is legal and correct, or even that the debtor being sued is the right person,"

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The Consumerist is featuring a neat expose on Circuit City as told by a former employee. Some of this stuff is scary familiar:

1. When buying any product, expect the salesmen to tell you that after around 13 months, a certain part or battery will need replacing. The common manufacturers warranty only covers 12 months parts and labor, so the customer is pushed to buy the extended warranty under the impression it will fail later…

20. If you don't get the accidental coverage on the item you just purchased that's coming from the warehouse, it may be "accidentally" dropped a few times. It's believed that when the customer comes back in with the messed up computer, that they will then opt for the coverage.

25. Circuit City has laid off over 4 thousand employees recently to hire cheaper workers. They fired associates who were highly ranked in sales and service, and paid well for that reason.

Except that they didn't fire people specifically, they just brought in a new manager to make everyone so miserable they quit. Most notable is the dirty tactics that salespeople will resort to even when they're "not on commission":

4. Every salesman is ranked by the number of protection plans (or extended warranties) that they sell. At my store all the time we would throw on scratch protection plans to CD's, since they're only a buck, most people don't notice. During the $9.99 CD special days, customers who weren't aware of the sale were easy prey.

13. When looking at computers, make sure that the tag you're looking at matches the floor model you're testing. We often would only put the faster computers on display that looked the same, so the customer would think that they're getting this fast computer when in reality, it's for the tag 3 feet away, and it's twice the price.

18. I've seen in the past of people hiding the less expensive speaker wires for car or home theater, or other such cables in the back warehouse. This makes customers buy the more expensive cables, assuming it's all there is.

26. Stores will keep great coupons such as "$10 off when you spend $100" up at customer service next to our ads that we give out. Sometimes they're only for the next week, encouraging that you come back Also almost everyday we were given a 10% off coupon to keep in our pocket in case we needed to give a discount to close a sale, making it look like we're making some special deal for them when really, it's just a plain old coupon that they could have brought.

The thing that Circuit City knows that most people might not is that you don't have to have a commissioned salesforce to make them into ruthless salespeople. Just threaten their job and keep applying more and more pressure to management to get the right "numbers" and it will trickle down.

McDonald's

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From the, "funny, but so appropriate" department, McDonald's is freaking out because "McJob" has been officially added to the Webster's Dictionary as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement". The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector".

McDonald's is lobbying to change the definition to: "reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding … and offers skills that last a lifetime"

They dropped their "don't be evil" motto for a reason

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Privacy International has released a report of privacy scores for top Internet companies and Google was notably the only one to receive the lowest ranking.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment, but I personally tend to side with Privacy International.

I like Google and use it constantly because of it's clean, simple interface and solid dependable results. However, when it comes to privacy, I don't think they're where they should be. They recently announced they'd annonymize all search records after 2 years, but that only announced to the world that they track searches to individual people and store that information for 2 years!

They say they need it for optimization, but I still haven't heard of anything they do that actually needs personally identifiable information to be optimized other than revenue streams from selling the data.