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from the Name,-phone-number,-*and*-ADDRESS?-How-do-you-change-THAT-for-$100? dept.
Comcast accidentally published 200,000 "unlisted" phone numbers:
Comcast mistakenly published the names, phone numbers, and addresses of nearly 200,000 customers who paid monthly fees to make their numbers unlisted. The names and numbers were made available on Ecolisting, a directory run by Comcast, and picked up by third-party directories. After discovering the mistake, Comcast shut Ecolisting down, gave $100 credits to affected customers, and advised them that they can change their phone numbers at no charge.
This is similar to a mistake in the early 2010s that resulted in Comcast paying a $33 million settlement in 2015.
The Denver Post reported last week:
For years, customers have had the ability to pay a small sum per month to ensure their phone numbers and personal information remain off of telephone and online directories. But in January and February, thousands of people across the country received letters from Xfinity telling them the company had inadvertently published personal information on Comcast's online directory, Ecolisting.com. The issue affected 2 percent of Comcast's 9.9 million voice customers, the company said.
Comcast charged $3.50 a month for the number-privacy feature in Pennsylvania, The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote. Customers elsewhere apparently paid more—some Comcast users on a support forum reported having to pay $5.50 per month.
In a statement to Ars, Comcast said, "We have corrected this issue for our identified customers, apologized to them for this error, and given them an additional $100 credit. We are working with our customers directly to address this issue and help make it right, and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again."
Related: https://www.techlicious.com/tip/remove-yourself-spokeo-intelius-peoplesmart-mylife/
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dwilson on Monday March 16 2020, @11:46PM (4 children)
Congratulations, it sounds like you live in an area with excellent cellular coverage. Coincidentally, areas like yours also typically boast excellent land-line availability and are generally noted for a high population density. Outliers with only one or two of the three are not uncommon, but still very much the exception rather than the rule.
Meanwhile, I'm in the back of the beyond. The only land-line available is the sort of copper associated with a 28.8 kb/s modem, the cellular coverage is "4G/LTE" on a good day but mostly 3G/H+ on every actual day, and when my connection is crap (more often crap than not), it seldom has anything to do with the rest of the internet.
I miss the ADSL I had ten years ago. It had higher throughput, lower latency, and better up-time than anything I can get where I'm at now.
I'm not bitter though. Don't believe otherwise.
- D
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 17 2020, @02:30AM (3 children)
I live in a "major metro" area, population ~1 million in a ~900 square mile area. My "cell service story" is that we're surrounded by cell towers, but they're all fairly far away, and then the house has a metal roof, so straight cellular service inside the house sucks mightily, but... modern phones & services switch over to WiFi pretty well, and when we're in the house 90+% of the time that's what we're using. It's not foolproof, and neither was Vonage when we used to do that, because it rides on Comcast internet as a carrier and they do screw up a lot more often than the old AT&T copper used to.
We do have some copper lines running into the house, I keep meaning to climb up on a ladder and cut them down, but I want to repurpose them as 12VDC lines for landscape lighting when I do, so they are "stored" in the air until I get around to that project. After those lines leave my yard they connect to AT&T, and, as companies go, AT&T is closer to Satan than most, in my opinion - I have no desire whatsoever to give them my money, and they certainly don't offer anything unique or superior to the rest of the market - I could buy ADSL through them, for about the same price as Comcast's cable, but since I'm not a gamer-ping-time hound that's not anything I care about.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Tuesday March 17 2020, @07:22PM (2 children)
Ah, I see. I mis-read your statement regarding cell-via-wifi, and I apologize for it. I thought you meant that you were using a cellular connection as your primary internet-connection, and disparaging internet-via-wires as something no one should need in this day and age. On that basis, I responded.
Normally I'd agree with you there, but I've had a bit of a crash course it latency over the past few years, and even though not a gamer, I now care mightily about ping times.
You want to see the modern internet fall down and go boom? Rig up a pi or something between you and your local gateway-to-the-world, and add a randomized latency of 500ms-to-10,000ms to every single packet that passes through, inbound or out. Randomized, mind! Can't give those clever network and transport layer protocols a chance to anticipate and adapt.
Under those conditions, you name it and it'll die. http(s), ssh, rsync, smtp. When our local connection here goes in to it's hell-mode, I've yet to find anything that doesn't choke on it.
- D
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 17 2020, @07:53PM (1 child)
Yeah, super-bad ping is... super-bad, and I assume at least part of the time that Comcast flakes on us, it's related to packet delay rather than outright loss.
The ADSL reference was: when both are working well, ADSL tends to have significantly lower ping times (and bandwidth) than Cable internet service. I used ADSL from about 1996 through ~2003, but after cable got their act sort of together and we started streaming Netflix, we switched to cable and have never considered switching back.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Friday March 20 2020, @04:13AM
Personally I'm looking forward to SpaceX's Starlink. I intend to at least try it.. can't be any worse than what I deal with already.
Cable doesn't exist in my area. DSL, either. ADSL or SDSL. ISDN died in the late 90's. Dial up is ... probably more -reliable- than what I've got, but not as good, strange as that is to conceive of. Starlink or bust, I guess?
- D