There are a lot of moving parts in many complex systems, and occasionally bugs arise which people who do not build complex systems for a living ascribe to huge amounts of malice and not, e.g., a mis-transposition in a SQL query or a missing tab in a file compiled by a temp hired by a firm four degrees from OfficeMax.
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.")
The question is not how that text got to be on the envelope, the question is why a retail company had collected that piece of information about a customer in the first place!
patio11, you're usually right on the money, but not this time. While it is true that the programming mistake was probably small, the end result was catastrophic for these parents. I would ask you to step back and reevaluate your "take on consensual reality" in this case. And at what point did anyone consent to being marketed to as grieving parents?
This is awful. It is not only awful due to being relentlessly insensitive, but it it another affirmation of something that has always taken place in marketing: dehuminzation.
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.
Dehumanizing - maybe, but the bigger issue in marketing imho is that it seems to be centered around finding more and more personal info about individuals. Most marketers seem to think that finding more personal info about customers can somehow turn into better sales.
Maybe this was meant to be a private note? I.e., a customer service rep at some company found out about their daughter, and they wanted to make sure other customer service reps would know about it and show appropriate sensitivity, so they added it to the CRM database. But somehow it ended up in the address instead of a private note field, and it was passed on to other companies.
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.
I don't think it's either. If we believe that it was a third party's mailing list, it's likely a data broker has attributes like that stored for each person in their database, and in shuffling data around, somehow that entry got appended or put in a field that was then used to address the business or person by name.
Yes, that's almost certainly what happened - but that doesn't make it better. It's none of their fucking business!! This is not something that belongs in a CRM database!
I'm guessing that companies are using all sorts of things, including newspaper articles, to be able to identify target markets. That doesn't bother me too much; once information is online, there's very little you can do to stop people from seeing it, and making these associations seems like a logical step.
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.
I like Europe's privacy laws in theory, but who's to say that the company is actually going to tell you the full story, and not just lie?
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?
'Seay said that he called an OfficeMax number Friday and that a manager at a call center refused to believe he'd been sent the letter addressed that way.'
'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.
It doesn't sound like you've worked in a call centre that services the general public. Stuff like this is workaday complaints from people who are either a bit crazy or just bored and looking for a fight.
This is in many ways worse than the incident where Target outed a pregnant teen to her parents by mailing coupons for baby stuff to her, at her parents' address, based on her shopping habits.
I'm not so sure. There is a chance that given a different father, the girl identified as pregnant could have been killed. This incident increased grief from a death that already occurred.
For some reason, this particular story of hit me hard. I'm rarely affected by human interest stories.
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.
Sadly, it reminds me of The Office where Michael Scott would always remember one striking fact about someone to connect with them.
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.
This is about human dignity, and it's just disgusting. I'd be ashamed to work at OfficeMax or any of those data collection firms.
"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.
I am inclined to agree. Presumably there is some text processing algorithm that matches the name and other entities that co-occur with high probability. In this case, the man's name probably co-occurred with that phrase. Abhorrent and sad.
I think the biggest story isn't how the mail is addressed, but that most people don't realize that large corporations know everything (minus one) about you.
I've seen something like this happen before, where a person registered an offensive phrase as a business name on a mailing list and was getting mail for it because no-one bothered to check the name. The fact that the mail was qualified with "... or current business" suggests a similar possibility (it really wouldn't be hard to register a place of business on Google Maps as "Daughter Killed In Car Crash" at his address).
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.)
I'd guess it was the result of a manual data-entry error after a previous telemarketing call. A rep meant to press a 'remove' button, adding a note - but the note wound up instead as an address line of a still-active entry.
[+] [-] patio11|12 years ago|reply
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.")
[+] [-] brazzy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] car|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftwarePatent|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memset|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wfunction|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hsuresh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eurleif|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] magicalist|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drak0n1c|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reuven|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] scott_karana|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] p9idf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RK|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] coin|12 years ago|reply
'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.
[+] [-] vacri|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rosser|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aridiculous|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pkill17|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] car|12 years ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] coloneltcb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sheetjs|12 years ago|reply
> ... 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.
[+] [-] eshvk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corobo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Oculus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pan69|12 years ago|reply
Why are they using another companies mailing list? What's wrong with theirs?
[+] [-] ballard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromulent|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pm|12 years ago|reply
The corollary is that someone out there's a real fucking asshole.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cynwoody|12 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] lozf|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cynwoody|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gojomo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|12 years ago|reply