Comment by de6u99er | Hacker News Reader

Comment by de6u99er | Hacker News Reader

A couple of weeks ago I was receiving someone else's T-Systems internet contract and personal data via email. The customer was from Munich. I live in The Netherlands. I was more than 10 years ago customer of T-Mobile Austria.

I immediately informed T-Systrms via their crappy contact form on their crappy website. After a couple of days I received an e-mail which I could not reply to, asking me to provide more proof that I was receiving someone else's emails through. It also said I can't reply directly to the email and I had to provide this info via their crappy contact form on their crappy website.

I refused to do so, since I had already given them the name, address, and customer id of their new customer and it seemed that the procedure is going to be unnecesarily time consuming.

After that I received emails about tracking of a package containing the hardware for the internet connection. Then I received an email that nobody was home to pick up the delivery and when the next attempt will be. UAnd utimately that the package was going to ve returned. After that I guess the customer got in touch with T-Systems and fixed the email error.

Nobody from T-Systems contacted me asking to destroy the documents and emails containing someone else's personal data.

Knowing how Deutsche Telekom operates, I find it unlikely that the German branch and the Austrian branch share enough systems to make accidental data sharing possible. Deutsche Telekom is a labyrinth of branches, departments and companies, each with their own systems and processes.

It's more likely that the person gave the wrong email.

This happens to me all the time, as have my lastname @gmail.com, and my name is not as unique as I thought. I typically contact the real person via some other information leaked in the email.

I once had a lady accuse me of cyber-stalking her, since I texted her when I started getting her Verizon internet information (bills, shipping info for equipment, etc). I finally managed to explain to her that she'd given them the wrong email.

My wife worked selling cell phones for a while. Apparently there are a huge number of older people who don’t understand that just because they put the email on the form that doesn’t mean they own the email address.

It's not just old people, many people who aren't techies think that entering an email address into a Telco form means they're ASKING for that email address. I get multiple emails per day for all sorts of services from all over the world because I was an early Gmail user with a short account name. Most are people signing up to new phone/internet/etc services and they have my name as their first or last name.

Same thing happens to me. When I get "verify your email" messages, I delete them. If I still get emails after that, I mark them as spam.

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