Your old friend Radio Shack sells you out.
Heater.
Posts: 21,230
All your personal information up for sale by RS.
http://www.itworld.com/article/2901029/radioshack-puts-customers-personal-data-up-for-sale-in-bankruptcy-auction.html
http://www.itworld.com/article/2901029/radioshack-puts-customers-personal-data-up-for-sale-in-bankruptcy-auction.html
Comments
http://www.itworld.com/article/2901029/radioshack-puts-customers-personal-data-up-for-sale-in-bankruptcy-auction.html
But Radio Shack is an even worse mess...
RS couldn't care less what they can pay back; it's out of their hands, and into the hands of the court. It's not up to them to come up with things to sell (nor are they allowed to), as whether they come up with $1 or $1 million, the end result is the same for them. They either emerge from BK restructured, or they are liquidated in a Chapter 7 and everyone goes home.
Behind the scenes, it's the trustee -- not Radio Shack -- combing through assets such as patents, trademarks, royalties, customer lists, and anything else that could be sold. This is the job of the trustee, and besides the legal requirement to do so, he/she has an added incentive as this is how they are paid.
The moral of the story is: Be careful who you give information to, you never know where that information will end up.
The auction is over, and there's a new "owner," according to the article, but all this needs the approval of a judge. Given lawsuits, or threats of lawsuits, the judge won't likely be inclined to allow the sale without extra consideration. The story talks about AT&T lodging a complaint, claiming RS was merely a facilitator for AT&T. I wouldn't doubt AT&T already has an injunction written up and ready to go (given the chance that Sprint may be resold the list in the end), should a judge okay the final sale. By the time the legal challenges are over, the data will be fairly stale, and not worth a fraction of what they paid.
A larger issue could come out of this. Apart from wireless sales that involved a written contract, or online sales, if Radio shack collected and retained customer credit card data beyond that prescribed by their acquiring banks, that data may be worthless as an asset anyway. It would be funny if the winner of the auction pays for data that ends up being unusable.
Email addresses are already of very low value. Anyone can buy 13 million good names collected from hacked shopping sites for far less than what they'd pay to buy Radio Shack's. There's no brand loyalty from spam, so a list from RS or from a spammer has the same inherent value, even when you consider RS's list is targeted.
But that is only as good as the management team is. New owners aren't always going to honor things a failed team put out there.
Over the years I have used a catchall email domain to track this by issuing emails in the form of company name at domain.
I am seeing quite a lot of "we won't sell" agreements being worthless. They trade the info, they rent, which isn't a sale, new owners just use the info, and it happens way more than I thought it ever would.
They also will perform services. They don't sell the onfo, rather access to it through them. Here is a message from our friends at....
My response has been to provide really bad info, or just deny it and see whether or not they want to do the transaction
Radio Shack always did, but they cried about it, or they sent a catalog to Joe Bloomstone over and over.
My favorite answer to that "would you like to get catalogs and other offers?" is, "for home heating? Yes, of course."
Now I really don't care. Giving out the varied emails means filtering it all, and I have few worries. If they see my browsing habits and want to suggest things, great. I am perfectly happy to continue to present as a confusing impression target which funds people who publish thing I value. Lies, errors and omissions are remarkably cheap currency.
In this case, it is all about getting a list of AT&T customers, and you can bet your Smile they had a clause in the contract about that whole thing being exclusive to and property of AT&T too.
But, that same slippery, "we won't sell" problem people have extends to AT&T, who made the same kind of deal with the same failed team...
It will come down to who really wants it and who will do and pay what to prevent it all.
Frankly, AT&T could just use that data right now. They tagged their customers from Tandy, and could just start messaging and making anti Sprint offers right now to marginalize the value of a customer list. Bet you legal and sales are cooking one up right now. Save 5 a month, but agree to these simple terms today kind of thing.
...all of which is why I nearly always pay the little guy a premium and select them every chance I get. Big corporate business is morbid.
No business that wants to stay in business wants to sell its private customer list. For one thing, once news of that gets out, the goodwill of the company tanks. For another, it's a legal swamp. I've read that about half the states have now filed an objection, citing Radio Shack's own privacy policy (a kind of contract with customers). Lawyers cost money, which is one thing they don't have.
I'm still sure you are right. But this is telling: They will spend more money on arguing the case for and against selling customers personal information than they would ever have got from selling such information.
Better to just have deleted it immediately. Cheap, efficient, no muss no fuss.
When the vultures move in it's not about doing the best thing only about what they can suck out of the corpse.
That's true, until it isn't. No joke. Those tagged emails I've been using for 15 years or so tell a very different tale. The number of companies who have said that and then sold the data isn't trivial. One day, I should go dig through and try to find out, but it's at least 1, maybe 2 in 5 who will do it over time in some fashion.
And it's again, sale, rental, service access, etc... lots of ways to use that list without actually selling it, and lots of ways to keep most people from picking up on it being done too. I get the tagged info and I know. The combination is the e-mail and a name variant I use. One or the other tends to make the deed stick out nice and easy.
Reasons vary, but include:
Need cash infusion
Another business makes a successful pitch to leverage that list to mutual benefit (happens a lot)
Change of management
Change of ownership, bought out, acquired, merged
Change in market place
Once the core team has moved on or been otherwise displaced and marginalized, I really don't consider that the same company anymore.
Radio Shack died. Game over. Somebody has the name, whatever, but it's just some relic now, all the old connotations are out the window. The best thing is to hope the team all found good places to continue working.
The information they're trying to sell is personal information, and the only LEGAL owner of that information is the person it identifies.
To pass it on they require the owner's consent!
Eeek! Not if they don't want to create even more legal woes. Once they started down the BK path, they had to preserve any potential asset. As mailing lists have in the past been sold through bankruptcy, I'm sure their company lawyers told them it was an asset they had to list.
It appears RS's biggest creditor had the winning bid for the customer list, and there's reason to believe they bid on other things, too -- possibly the name itself, the online store, all that. If so, their likely intention is to run Radio Shack as a going concern, but as a smaller and more compact entity. The company may have been "sold" through a BK auction, but technically it's still Radio Shack, so the privacy policy is met in spirit, if not to the letter. We'll see.
It isn't over until the fat lady sings, or Erco buys out the remaining stock of every Radio Shack store in Southern California.
-Phil
Being a Trekkie, I usually used "Chris Pike" as my name, but the jig was up when I once used their layaway program and had to go by my real name.
There is a pile of parcels at the "dead letter" office containing what now are sure to be dead batteries, all addressed to Chris Pike
what does one expect?
It is a snoopy world. We have gone so far beyond the Orwellian '1984' that discussion is silly. This thread too may be watched and sold.
Yes, the bankruptcy court may have a right to sell off customer data. And what that converts into is 'more junk mail' in your e-mail. I already have had to fend off 300-400 items per day at times.
What I really would like... is to never see another RS bankruptcy thread on the Parallax forums. And that too seems an impossiblity. It certainly would be nice to be able to block by key word in the subject line. (I know I am dreaming.)
Heater, you are just rabble-rousing.
Rouse rabble, rouse, rouse. Rebel against the snooping, spying, treacherous infidels!
Cue sound of crickets....
Of course, when a thread title clearly mentions RS you could simply not click on it.