Oops, sorry - 14,000 e-mail accounts get deleted
Looks like Charter, a national cable and high-speed internet provider, decided to include more than just inactive accounts in its routine email account deletion. Although arguably not as bad as over-billing your customers a year in advance to the tune of $7.5 million, 14,000 users that had e-mail accounts with Charter found them to be completely emptied, including all the cute photos of the grandchildren and other attachments.Worse yet, it's gone for good. According to the AP, Charter says that none of it can be restored. To make amends, the company credited the bill of each user who's account was deleted with $50. Better than nothing, but still - the only excuse Charter could come up with for this error was that something like this had never happened before.
All told, the mistake cost them $700,000 - and a few customers, perhaps. It seems that irresponsible handling of customer data has virtually no repercussions beyond self-inflicted ones. Airlines lose luggage on occasion, but not a whole day's flights worth of luggage. But who's to blame? The users who failed to protect their own data or the company that failed to protect the user's data?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bob said 2:39AM on 1-25-2008
Do you have authorization to rewrite this? The AP is really strict on article rewrites:
"The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. "
....
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Peter said 7:11AM on 1-25-2008
"Although arguably not as bad as over-billing your customers a year in advance"
Not as bad? This is FAR WORSE because the data is gone. The over-billing can be corrected, this mistake cannot be corrected.
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hazard said 7:58AM on 1-25-2008
agreed .. this is much worse
Jonathan Coffman said 8:47AM on 1-25-2008
Yes I'd have to say that this IS far worse than over-billing. I'd much rather have my emails and attachments in the long-run over having to wait a few days for a refund to get processed.
The accountability point is the kicker here, we as users are responsible for our own data (although we're often reckless), but the tech companies should have some level of responsibility.
The blanket *these services should not be used for business or other critical uses....We provide no guarantee of suitability or reliability for these services...* statements in the TOS for ISPs is horrible, there are no protections for the consumer in this case. Unfortunate as it is.
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Paul said 9:16AM on 1-25-2008
Is there some sort of hidden issue between DLS and DreamHost? The original slanted article against them when their billing clusterf--k occurred, and now this.
There is no way that being accidentally charged a couple of hundred bucks and then having that charge quickly reversed is anywhere near as bad as having all of your email permanently deleted.
Quick thought experiment. If I trashed all of your email, would you lend me a few hundred bucks for a couple of days if I gave it back to you?
Thought so.
This is exactly what I was talking about when I was saying that DreamHost's "unprofessional" way of dealing with their issue was preferable to the way that most companies handle such things. Basically Charter is saying "read your TOS, we're not responsible". Very professional. Not very helpful.
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Rid said 4:23PM on 1-25-2008
I couldn't agree more, and I think this Dreamhost issue is getting a little old. If you feel the need to gripe after a single overcharge, no matter how reasonable the mistake, fine, but there are a thousand similar content tech blogs where I feel I won't have to keep hearing about it in other stories.
wjg said 10:42AM on 1-25-2008
So, the follow on story should be about how to backup web-based email (gmail, hotmail,...)
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James said 11:23AM on 1-25-2008
How in the living hell does a multi-million-dollar internationally-recognized company manage to *not* have any data backups? I mean, I could understand if it were like "All your emails sent or received between 1/20 and 1/22 are gone forever", but *all* email? Like there's not even a stack of month-old tapes sitting in a closet somewhere? WTF?
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Jack Hodgson said 12:41PM on 1-26-2008
Their "inability" to restore the mail makes me wonder what sort of backups their doing?
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Jerome said 4:11PM on 2-01-2008
Geezz.. That's a lot of money! Don't they have a good mirroring system, recovery procedure or anything that could make a difference? I hope all parties related could learn something from this lost and anticipate better next time.
Regards,
Jerome
http://www.3binformations.info
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may said 5:06PM on 2-19-2008
Yahoo just permanently deleted over 200 of my emails last week. I wrote to them, but by the time they got back to me, 24 hrs. had already passed and they claimed that's the reason they won't be able to retrieve any of it.
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