Upon receiving some strange results when I asked Shaw Communications about what information they had on me, I followed up with their investigations unit to see if they were aware that they had released information about other people in my privacy request for information. Here are the relevant bits of the email:

Upon investigation we have determined that Service Calls are tied to the service address, not the customers themselves. We have changed our process to ensure Service Calls per customer are sent upon request, rather than all historical Service Calls tied to that service address.

Excellent. I am glad they are changing their process, though I have no idea how we can ensure this change will actually happen.

Upon further investigation regarding the trouble ticketing details you received from your neighbor, we found that there was a data entry error … The staff responsible for the error has been re-trained and additional flags have been put in place within Trouble Ticketing and on the associated account(s) to notify others of this error. This should ensure this does not occur again in this case.

Another win. Hopefully the staff fully recovered from “re-training” … 😉

One other note for those interested, the privacy officer informed me that “Information may be retained for a minimum of 7 years”. Seems long, but that is a term dictated by the company, not by PIPEDA.

Well, I am glad that just a few minutes of work on my part identified bugs in Shaw’s system so that they can improve their operations. I am sure you have heard of Linus’s Law, one of the principles of Open Source, “that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Imagine if every person in the country wrote their telecom providers, imagine how many bugs we might find, and then imagine the better and more privacy-protecting processes that would come out of such a letter-writing campaign? We should not depend solely on government regulators to audit the carriers, not especially when there is such a simple tool for the public to audit. So I encourage you, take five minutes and send off the form letters Chris Parsons has prepared for you in his post: Responding the the Crisis in Canadian Telecommunications.

PS. I am still waiting on Bell Mobility’s results, which I will post as soon as they come in.

[UPDATE July 11, 2014] Here is Bell’s response.