I received a great email from K yesterday, and thought I would share it with everyone. I’m sure you will find her technique for catching companies who breach their privacy policy as ingenious as I do! I’m posting her email (with her permission) as written.
Hi. I always enjoy getting your e-mails, and you’ve helped my survey time be much more effective than ever. THANK YOU!-I seldom have anything noteworthy to pipe in about, but alas… I have some input.
I’ve been doing the shoppershotline home scanning thing for a couple of years, enduring their glitches along the way (not awarding won prizes, and such). Every time I write them about an issue, it’s a forever wait and see if I get a response; if I call, I get some person in a foreign land reciting answers from their book of quotes, but seldom actually answering my question. But then, a couple weeks ago a strange thing happened. Everyday, & I do mean EVERY day, the phone would ring and someone who DOES speak English would call and say something along the lines of: “yes, I’m calling from shoppershotline to ask you some quick questions about a few items you have recently purchased….” I’ve told them I’m not interested in ‘cold calls’ and to please not call me. I checked my account preferences and if indicated I indeed has entered ‘NO” to the question about if I would want to be called. Then last Saturday, the phone rang and it was a friendly young fellow , first confirming my name as it’s on the account, and then starting his pitch. I was very nice to the kid, because he caught me at a good time when i wasn’t busy.. so I asked him if there was a way to get my name REALLY off the list of call numbers.
What he then told me was interesting. He said he doesn’t actually work for shoppers hotline, but for a survey company who gets their call list from shoppers hotline; that if he took my name off HIS list, it would only serve HIM not calling me back, but that my info would be given to the next survey group and it would continue forever, that he has had people tell him they’ve called shoppershotline causing a huge stink yet their info is still on his lists. He added that he didn’t know what’s in it for me to be a member of “SH”, but that he knows folks who’ve canceled their service, yet still are on the call list. The kid was very nice & i offered to take his survey since he had been so kind to me. He told me it didn’t matter as he’s paid hourly & it doesn’t matter if he actually gets to give the survey.
I called S.H. and told them the situation. The response was: “we NEVER give out information about our members”. He was VERY insistent about it. Here’s the problem with that theory. EVERY time I sign up for something, I vary my name ever so slightly. Just like leaving the last letter off my first name, or some other ‘innocent mistake” sort of variance. Shoppershotline is the only, absolutely the only time I have used my name is the particular way that I was called by S.H. AND the survey people!
There is no possible other way for them to have my contact information. The S.H. person insisted it was impossible and we were in a stalemate. He asked if I would like to speak with a supervisor. Yes indeed. After a couple minutes, the same guy came back & told me the problem was being investigated and I’d be contacted soon. I instructed him to e-mail, because i don’t want people calling me! Fine, that was the plan. A couple days later, the phone rang, the foreign voice confirmed my ‘exact name as on the account’, then told me he was looking into my question. He demanded this couldn’t be from them, because they DO NOT share info. blah, blah, we went back and forth about it. Then he asked me for the name and telephone number of the different people who have called with surveys. I don’t have caller ID, so his next test was for me to tell him what companies they surveyors were from. Who’s not following along???? I re-explained, they had all said they were from S.H., but I had questioned the kid who had then told me they just buy the list from S.H.
Oh no, couldn’t happen, wouldn’t happen.we have a strict privacy policy. Fine, the kid had information that could ONLY have been gotten from S.H. Mr.Foreign said he’d be researching it, and by the way has my contact information changed.??? What? apparently NOT! He’s final remark was to thank me for being such a wonderful member of their fabulous program, and was there anything else he could do for me…….
While I believe that giving accurate information is critical when signing up, there have been a few times when it has served me well to make tiny changes. It’s in no way to de-fraud the companies, that’s not in me. I play fair and square. BUT, if I get junk mail addressed to “abcd” (not my real name, LOL) than I know the information was leaked by company “1234′ (not their real name), and if i get catalogs addressed to “abdc”(also not my real name), then the info was leaked by company “1243″! If my name was listed identically on all accounts, I’d have no way to know who breached their own so called ‘privacy policy’. While this may sound a bit paranoid to some, I want to know who is not trustworthy with my information. We give out so much info to some of these companies and if they are not keeping actual private info private… well, I want to know.
Thanks again for the brilliant job you do!
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K (not “1234″)
