Privacy Breach

Posted: Wed 2 September, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Agency Idiocy, Business, Corbett, Customer Services, Geeky, Laziness, Marketing, People, Stupidity, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

Yet again, today there’s a story about another place revealing a confidential list of customers in emails – and as usual, in what’s known as a Corbett round here (courtesy of a certain Irish marketing person) it’s looking like the leaker sent the email using CC instead of BCC.

In this case, the information is even more sensitive than usual, as it’s people who’ve used a particular STI clinic in London, and may have also revealed their HIV status.  Oh, bloody whoops.

It amazes me how often this seems to happen – and how easy it should be to fix.

The first answer is, obviously, train people.

But after that, it’s about defending against laziness and stupidity.  But even that’s pretty easy.

All it really needs is a block on recipients in CC.  If you’re sending an email and it’s got more than (say) 10 addresses in the CC field, it simply asks if you’re sure you want to send it with those people in CC rather than BCC.  That’s an email-client thing – but is easy to do.

It can’t be that difficult – my own email clients all already ask if I want to send an email with no attachments if the message contains keywords like ‘attached’ or ‘CV’, after all.

A similar thing could be done on the mail-server as well – put in a rule that if there’s more than [defined limit] of addresses in the CC, it doesn’t send without an authorisation, an acknowledgement that this is OK.

There will still be the odd blithering fucktrumpet who manages to send out a whole mailing-list in CC (or even To) – but at least make it harder for them to do so.

Surely that’s not asking too much?

 

The Devil in the Details – Nissan

Posted: Thu 22 May, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Bad Ads, Corbett, Cynicism, Driving, Green, Marketing, People, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

As regular readers will know, I have a really bad habit of reading the small print. (I say ‘really bad’ although it’s not – anyone who doesn’t deserves everything they get. It’s just ‘really bad’ from the advertiser’s perspective)  There’s two ads doing the rounds at the moment that annoy me, so you know what? You get two posts out of it.  Lucky you.

The first (which arrived in my inbox just now, and motivated me to write it) was for a leasing arrangement on a new car – a Nissan Leaf, if anyone cares.

The deal offered is this :

The 100% electric New Nissan LEAF Visia Flex FROM ONLY £199 A MONTH*
WITH A £3,250 ADVANCE RENTAL CONTRIBUTION

OK, so they mention that “Advance Rental Contribution” (which is a deposit, surely?) right at the start, and already it’s skewing the figures. But then we get to the bottom, and the small print…

Finance is available subject to status on eligible new vehicles registered between 01/04/14 and 30/06/14 in the UK to persons aged 18 or over. Rental stated is for Nissan lease. Advance rental of £5,750 (includes £3,250 Advance Rental Contribution) followed by 48 monthly rentals of £199 a month and final rental of £6,201.

Hang on – £5,750 upfront? That’s another £2,500, on top of the “Advance Rental Contribution” – where has it come from, and what’s it for? Even if you take out the first month’s £199, that’s still £2,300 unexplained.  Fucking hell.

All told – with all those amounts listed, that comes to £21,503. For a poxy Nissan Leaf.

But then it gets better…  (Sorry, “better”)

Once you have paid the final rental you can keep using the car by paying an annual rental of £50 + VAT; if you choose Nissan lease then you will never own the car.

As well as entering in to a lease agreement for the vehicle, you will need to enter in to a separate lease agreement for the battery. Monthly price shown includes the on-going monthly battery lease charge of £70.

Now they’re just taking the piss, surely ? So even when you’ve stumped up your £21,503 – sorry, £21,563 including that little final ‘annual rental’ charge, then you will *still* be paying £70 a month for the fucking batteries?

Up yours, Nissan.

Legalised

Posted: Tue 22 October, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Advertising, Corbett, Cynicism, D4D™, Geeky, Legal, Marketing, Stupidity, Time | Leave a comment »

It’s now two years since my little spat with Ian Corbett (of Toyota Ireland) and his legal advisors was completed.  I said at the time that the way they’d requested things to work out wouldn’t actually get rid of the search engine results that annoyed him so much. But he’s a marketing manager, so one assumes he knows these things, and that I would be wrong.

On a random whim, I searched the other day on Google for said person – and lo, I was right. Even when searching for just name + company (with no mention of D4D™ at all) up comes D4D™ with a nice healthy 4th place in the search results. And now there’s also Google Images, I can also see what the glaikit bawbag looks like, too.

All told, I can’t deny, I do find this very amusing. And there’s nothing at all I can do about it, it’s all in the hands of That There Google.

London Police Corbett

Posted: Thu 2 February, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Corbett, Customer Services, Marketing, Stupidity, Technology | Tags: , | 1 Comment »

I see in today’s news that the Metropolitan Police have committed a Corbett, ‘inadvertently sharing the email addresses’ of ‘a number of’ victims of crime with each other. In total 1,136 emails were sent out on Monday, the Metropolitan Police said.

Yep, another case of CC: instead of BCC:

Of course, it’s not a Full Corbett, because the Met has actually apologised, and will write to the people involved, explaining what happened. Let’s hope they use BCC this time…