Careful with that data!
A friendly reminder from the Boston Globe’s oops department to be very careful what you do with your attendees’ registration data: Subscriber credit data distributed by mistake. As a subscriber, I am not happy. While I can’t imagine meeting attendee credit card and other data being used to wrap newspapers as subscriber info was, you never know what could happen if someone doesn’t pay close attention to how it’s stored. I know, I don’t have to tell you that, but then again, if it could happen to the Globe, it could happen to anyone.
Update: And it offers a lesson in customer service as well. The 800 number was so overwhelmed that they had to add I think it was 200 people to answer the phones by yesterday afternoon. And when I tried to look it up on the Web site after hearing they had set something up on their pages on the news last night, I couldn’t find it anywhere on the home or subscriber pages. I finally saw the specific URL printed in today’s paper. C’mon guys, you can do better than that. (Fortunately, it looks like we weren’t among the poor people whose credit card numbers went out to all the local retail outlets and newspaper carriers.)
Related Topics: Helpful hints
