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Archive for June, 2009

In 200,000 years on Earth, humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution. The price to pay is high, but it’s too late to be a pessimist: humanity has barely ten years to reverse the trend, become aware of the full extent of its spoliation of the Earth’s riches and change its patterns of consumption.

More than a movie, HOME will be a major event all over the globe : for the first time ever, a film will be released on the same day in over 50 countries and on every format : movie theatres, TV, DVD and Internet.

On June 5th we all have a date with the planet !

*I will post the full length film here when it is available.

UPDATE: The film is not embeddable… Weak… View it here.

[Home Official Site | YouTube]

It appears as though Telus has sold given my private information (full name, home address, and phone number) to spammers and telemarketers.

How do I know Telus is to blame? Two reasons:

  • First, I accidentally gave them the wrong unit number when I signed up for my internet connection.
  • Second, I don’t have a land line so they assigned me a fake phone number (technical term is a ‘dry loop’ I think) when I signed up for their ISP service.

That exact fake phone number Telus assigned to me AND the incorrect unit number I gave them (by accident) have appeared on the internet in several places. In other words, unique identifiers that only came from Telus…

My private information publicly available on CanPages:

my info canpages

My private information publicly available on Pipl:

my info pipl

Friends of mine who use Telus as their ISP have also had their full names, addresses, and phone numbers published online. So it’s not just me…

I tried contacting some people at Telus about it and never heard back. I sent some tweets and DMs to @Telus. Of course they didn’t respond. UPDATE: @Telus responded by telling me someone from the privacy department would contact me. No word from the privacy department yet though.

I guess it’s no shocker that companies are operating like this. I just feel like selling your customers’ private information to spammers is about as douchey as you can get. The Telus lawyers have probably buried it somewhere in the privacy policy/EULA/TOS boilerplate that nobody ever reads. Either way it’s still nuclear fucking fail.

BTW, I’ve moved since Telus sold gave my private information away so don’t bother sending your love letters to that old address. Also, the phone number is fake…

telus spam

UPDATE June 4 2009. I spoke with someone from Telus named “Dev”.

Dev says it was an “agent error”. The problem is every single other person I know who uses Telus has also had their information published…

Here is an mp3 of the call. Apologies for the lowfi audio.

Unfortunately this solves nothing. The damage is done.

UPDATE 2 June 4 2009.

If you’re curious about your info have a look here:

http://www.canpages.ca/
http://pipl.com/
http://www.mytelus.com/phonebook/display.do

I also want to make it clear that I have no ill will towards Telus I’m just upset that this happened.