Telus is Selling Giving Your Personal Information to Spammers

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 private information publicly available on 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…

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.