Dad gets OfficeMax mail addressed 'Daughter Killed in Car Crash'
latimes.com
latimes.com
For OfficeMax, the most important takeaway is probably "You should encourage your employees to apologize and demonstrate empathy, and you should give line managers a BatPhone to the CEO's office because this is certainly BatPhone-worthy."
(I once worked as a customer service telephone operator for a large office supply store which is a direct competitor of OfficeMax. I'm quite aware that their call center receives, minimally, several hundred calls a month from people who have sharply different takes on consensual reality than most of us do. That said, I also remember the two keys I'd need to hit on the phone to get the Vice President on the line, and I'm absolutely positive that if I had escalated that call in that fashion my boss would have said "That was the right decision.")
For example, suppose a marketing company has a computer system which organizes people by households. They call a household and ask for a particular member. She's recently deceased. They type a note on that household's record, with the intention that the next person accessing that record knows that they should under no circumstances ask for the daughter who recently passed away in tragic circumstances. Some years later, a software or process bug results in that record getting entered into a mail merge.
Skepticism about the father's claim was a mistake, but it's not an inconceivable mistake to me. After anyone at OfficeMax had realized that the allegation was true, my ideal state of the world is that the CEO is on the phone within 5 minutes.
This is getting conflated with two other issues:
"Did OfficeMax actually intend to send this letter?" No. Of course not.
"Does OfficeMax having created a system which allows this letter to get sent mean that OfficeMax should fix the system?" Yes, OfficeMax should identify and fix the bug which allowed this to happen. In contrast to many people, I believe that the type of bug which caused this is likely rather minor. I would not agree that e.g. this letter is by itself a persuasive case that direct mail is evil, for example.
Somewhere along the line we got the idea that nothing negative must happen to us, and if it is, it's the worst thing ever. We're not that fragile. It's not a nice experience, but neither is it life-destroying.
Now lets imagine that the agency I worked for was sold/aquired at some point and eventually resulted in a mailout being performed on the database.
You can imagine the result if the comment field was accidentally included in the mail-merge, or some substring of it;
"Dear Great candidate, gap in work history due to marriage. Now divorced and wanting to get back get back into the industry, have you considered funeral insurance?"
Pattio11's point is quite valid.
Edit: Sorry, hit the wrong 'reply' button. This post was meant for the parent
This is an unfortunate edge-case of a database error that would be merely annoying or amusing in 99.999% of circumstances, but it's not an argument for never collecting this sort of data. The alternative is a sort of institutional amnesia in which the organisation is simply incapable of behaving sensitively because they don't know that there is anything to be sensitive about.
>We logged it because the customer wanted us to log it.
So customers actually requested that you collect personal information on them?
"My kid can't walk, so I'm not interested. Please don't try to sell me this again."
We think about "conversion rates", "retention rates", "buy our CRM to keep track of all of your relationships!" just like that jerk who kept a spreadsheet of his okcupid dates. (Okcupid dating is similarly dehumanizing - one begins to treat it like an online marketing funnel.) Like we're all sheep being herded through a funnel-shaped fence by some social media manager in midtown.
Turns out these are just people, trying to get by in life, who don't really benefit that much from folks trying to scrape every iota of data about them just to get 'em to buy what, in this case, a pack of cheap ballpoint pens or something? Sheesh.
People are making it sound like the company was intentionally trying to use their dead daughter for marketing purposes. I doubt that is the case.
The information that the employees at a small store know about me comes from establishing a relationship with those employees, from natural, organic chatter with them. I share it with them, and they share stuff with me, to establish a rapport. If those people were to share those details with their colleagues specifically to try and target me for marketing action, I'd feel that our personal relationship was being taken advantage of for the sake of the commercial relationship, which would make me withdraw from the personal relationship.
In particular, when it comes to this sort of personal information ("my daughter died in a car crash"), this is the stuff you share with people you specifically trust, because you have an actual, preexisting relationship. It's something deeply personal, that you expect you can trust the other person to keep private. Not something you expect, or want, to be added to your client file.
But OK, I understand how some people could see this as legitimate. However, are we in agreement that it is absolute not acceptable to sell this information to other companies?
That said, there are two major problems that I see here:
(1) The lack of a European-style law allowing people to find out what information a company has about them. The recipient of this mail should be able to ask Office Max what information they have about him, and they should be required to provide it, as well as say from whom they got the original information. Saying that they bought the information from a third party is a cop out.
(2) Some programmer, somewhere in Office Max, did an incredibly stupid JOIN, or the equivalent for whatever database they were using. I can't imagine what the possible reason was for displaying this sort of thing, and printing it out, but displaying that sort of "rationale" field is a huge no-no. In this particular case, it completely traumatized the parents, who had already gone through an awful experience.
It seems incredibly obvious to me that Office Max should apologize to this family. Whatever it takes to fix this, they should do. Free merchandise for the parents seems cheesy, but perhaps establishing a scholarship in the daughter's name, or something to help grieving parents, or to prevent car accidents, would be reasonable.
For all we know, their sensitive "customer analytics" fields are not dumped when you make an information request, so you might only get a sanitized response?
King George II
Kermit Project
612 W 115th St
New York, NY 10025-7721
'Then, he said, a spokeswoman for OfficeMax "acted the same way" shortly before he was interviewed by NBC-5 reporter Nesita Kwan on Friday. (Kwan told The Times she couldn't comment until she received approval from her supervisors.) The spokeswoman was more conciliatory after she received a photo of the envelope, Seay said.'
As usual it's not acknowledged until it's taken public.
Maybe because it's the quintessential example of the tension between abstract systems and conscious life.
If this kind of thing isn't enough to get people to take technology and business ethics seriously, I don't think there's much preventing the rise of a sociopathic society.
Computers, engines and rats != people.
It seems this third party mailing list populated the wrong fields with some sensitive info. Terrible mistake, really. Must've been an awful jolt when they saw it.
"Retail giant Target reportedly knows how to use its data to identify pregnant customers, and it recently lost tens of millions of customers' credit and debit card information to hackers, among other data."
"Gatherers of consumer data also are reportedly selling off lists of rape victims and AIDS and HIV patients, a privacy group told Congress in December."
I shudder thinking about what kind of information about all of us is being collected and sold, without any recourse. And corporate interests are keeping better privacy laws from getting passed. So the can squeeze the maximum profit from consumer cattle.
All of us working in 'big data' should think real hard what we deem ethically acceptable.
> ... a result of a mailing list rented through a third-party provider
This is analogous to someone looking at the obituaries in a newspaper and cross-referencing the phone book.
This is disgusting.
Why are they using another companies mailing list? What's wrong with theirs?
The corollary is that someone out there's a real fucking asshole.
Back in the eighties, I came across a computer letter addressed to "Mr. Intl B. MacHines". Very simple. Upper-case garbage in, mixed-case garbage out! Printed using a mylar ribbon, so it looked like it was typed on an eighties executive office typewriter. (At the time, computer output was usually upper case and of lesser print quality, thus the mylar ribbon deception.)