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Dad gets OfficeMax mail addressed 'Daughter Killed in Car Crash'
- coloneltcb 13y agoThe ugly side of big data
- sheetjs 13y agoThe article suggests a simpler explanation: > ... a result of a mailing list rented through a third-party provider This is analogous to someone looking at the obituaries in a newspaper and cross-referencing the phone book.
- streetnigga 13y agoWhich is still ugly.
- manish_gill 13y agoExcept when it's automated, as the top comment said, it gets dehumanised. Presumably there is a real human being reading the obituary and cross-referencing, who would be sensitive enough not to include that information. This is disgusting.
- eshvk 13y agoI am inclined to agree. Presumably there is some text processing algorithm that matches the name and other entities that co-occur with high probability. In this case, the man's name probably co-occurred with that phrase. Abhorrent and sad.
- memset 13y agoThis is awful. It is not only awful due to being relentlessly insensitive, but it it another affirmation of something that has always taken place in marketing: dehuminzation. We think about "conversion rates", "retention rates", "buy our CRM to keep track of all of your relationships!" just like that jerk who kept a spreadsheet of his okcupid dates. (Okcupid dating is similarly dehumanizing - one begins to treat it like an online marketing funnel.) Like we're all sheep being herded through a funnel-shaped fence by some social media manager in midtown. Turns out these are just people, trying to get by in life, who don't really benefit that much from folks trying to scrape every iota of data about them just to get 'em to buy what, in this case, a pack of cheap ballpoint pens or something? Sheesh.
- wfunction 13y ago"Or Current Business" is what gets me.
- Ygg2 13y agoNow imagine his Daughther/Son was killed/raped. It actually crosses the line twice.
- baddox 13y agoWhat about this story do you think is an example of dehumanization?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- reuven 13y agoI think that it'll speak volumes, not just to the bereaved parents, but also to the employees of Office Max, if the CEO were to demonstrate a true, deep apology. Corporate culture is an important thing. This is the sort of thing that's serious enough for employees to work on Sunday to fix. My impression, from reading the article, is that they'll start to take it seriously when they get to work on Monday. That's already two news cycles too late for them to undo the PR damage they've done to themselves.
- ballard 13y agoIf it wasn't made immediately, which could have ended the story, an appology is never happening because it's tantamount to an admission of legal culpability. Also few CEOs of large orgs have the spine to take any risk for the greater good because they're beholden to their board and their shareholders. That's just the way these folks are, by and large.
- brazzy 13y agoThe fact that companies collect and trade this hugely personal, emotional information about their customers in order to fake a small-town general store atmosphere where the guy at the counter knows everyone's personal history, when in fact it's just a minimum wage call center drone looking at a CRM database.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pkill17 13y agoSadly, it reminds me of The Office where Michael Scott would always remember one striking fact about someone to connect with them. It seems this third party mailing list populated the wrong fields with some sensitive info. Terrible mistake, really. Must've been an awful jolt when they saw it.
- rosser 13y agoThis is in many ways worse than the incident where Target outed a pregnant teen to her parents by mailing coupons for baby stuff to her, at her parents' address, based on her shopping habits.
- protomyth 13y agoI'm not so sure. There is a chance that given a different father, the girl identified as pregnant could have been killed. This incident increased grief from a death that already occurred.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- eurleif 13y agoMaybe this was meant to be a private note? I.e., a customer service rep at some company found out about their daughter, and they wanted to make sure other customer service reps would know about it and show appropriate sensitivity, so they added it to the CRM database. But somehow it ended up in the address instead of a private note field, and it was passed on to other companies. People are making it sound like the company was intentionally trying to use their dead daughter for marketing purposes. I doubt that is the case.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- magicalist 13y agoI don't think it's either. If we believe that it was a third party's mailing list, it's likely a data broker has attributes like that stored for each person in their database, and in shuffling data around, somehow that entry got appended or put in a field that was then used to address the business or person by name.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- drak0n1c 13y agoMost likely the automated system that determines who to send college/back-to-school oriented mailings to failed in a bad way.
- brazzy 13y agoYes, that's almost certainly what happened - but that doesn't make it better. It's none of their fucking business!! This is not something that belongs in a CRM database!
- eurleif 13y agoIf you went to a small store regularly, would it be creepy for the employees to know that about you? Why is it creepy for a big business to know the same thing? It's normal for businesses to get to know their customers.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- p9idf 13y agoSome junk mailers scrape the web for addresses: King George II Kermit Project 612 W 115th St New York, NY 10025-7721 http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/george.html http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/george.html
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- RK 13y agoNot quite the same, but I used to receive junk mail addressed to "Jesus Christ" at an old address.
- coin 13y ago'Seay said that he called an OfficeMax number Friday and that a manager at a call center refused to believe he'd been sent the letter addressed that way.' 'Then, he said, a spokeswoman for OfficeMax "acted the same way" shortly before he was interviewed by NBC-5 reporter Nesita Kwan on Friday. (Kwan told The Times she couldn't comment until she received approval from her supervisors.) The spokeswoman was more conciliatory after she received a photo of the envelope, Seay said.' As usual it's not acknowledged until it's taken public.
- vacri 13y agoIt doesn't sound like you've worked in a call centre that services the general public. Stuff like this is workaday complaints from people who are either a bit crazy or just bored and looking for a fight.
- Oculus 13y agoI think the biggest story isn't how the mail is addressed, but that most people don't realize that large corporations know everything (minus one) about you.
- patio11 13y agoThere are a lot of moving parts in many complex systems, and occasionally bugs arise which people who do not build complex systems for a living ascribe to huge amounts of malice and not, e.g., a mis-transposition in a SQL query or a missing tab in a file compiled by a temp hired by a firm four degrees from OfficeMax. For OfficeMax, the most important takeaway is probably "You should encourage your employees to apologize and demonstrate empathy, and you should give line managers a BatPhone to the CEO's office because this is certainly BatPhone-worthy." (I once worked as a customer service telephone operator for a large office supply store which is a direct competitor of OfficeMax. I'm quite aware that their call center receives, minimally, several hundred calls a month from people who have sharply different takes on consensual reality than most of us do. That said, I also remember the two keys I'd need to hit on the phone to get the Vice President on the line, and I'm absolutely positive that if I had escalated that call in that fashion my boss would have said "That was the right decision.")
- brazzy 13y agoThe question is not how that text got to be on the envelope, the question is why a retail company had collected that piece of information about a customer in the first place!
- patio11 13y agoSomeone typed it into a computer at some time in the past, and after information is in a computer, it remaining in a computer is a much safer bet than "And then it got deleted and we never spoke about it again." For example, suppose a marketing company has a computer system which organizes people by households. They call a household and ask for a particular member. She's recently deceased. They type a note on that household's record, with the intention that the next person accessing that record knows that they should under no circumstances ask for the daughter who recently passed away in tragic circumstances. Some years later, a software or process bug results in that record getting entered into a mail merge.
- sjs382 13y ago> In a statement, OfficeMax said the mailing "is a result of a mailing list rented through a third-party provider"
- aridiculous 13y agoFor some reason, this particular story of hit me hard. I'm rarely affected by human interest stories. Maybe because it's the quintessential example of the tension between abstract systems and conscious life. If this kind of thing isn't enough to get people to take technology and business ethics seriously, I don't think there's much preventing the rise of a sociopathic society. Computers, engines and rats != people.
- pan69 13y ago>> OfficeMax said in a statement that the mailing was a mistake and that it was using another company's mailing list. Why are they using another companies mailing list? What's wrong with theirs?
- reuven 13y agoI'm guessing that companies are using all sorts of things, including newspaper articles, to be able to identify target markets. That doesn't bother me too much; once information is online, there's very little you can do to stop people from seeing it, and making these associations seems like a logical step. That said, there are two major problems that I see here: (1) The lack of a European-style law allowing people to find out what information a company has about them. The recipient of this mail should be able to ask Office Max what information they have about him, and they should be required to provide it, as well as say from whom they got the original information. Saying that they bought the information from a third party is a cop out. (2) Some programmer, somewhere in Office Max, did an incredibly stupid JOIN, or the equivalent for whatever database they were using. I can't imagine what the possible reason was for displaying this sort of thing, and printing it out, but displaying that sort of "rationale" field is a huge no-no. In this particular case, it completely traumatized the parents, who had already gone through an awful experience. It seems incredibly obvious to me that Office Max should apologize to this family. Whatever it takes to fix this, they should do. Free merchandise for the parents seems cheesy, but perhaps establishing a scholarship in the daughter's name, or something to help grieving parents, or to prevent car accidents, would be reasonable.
- scott_karana 13y agoI like Europe's privacy laws in theory, but who's to say that the company is actually going to tell you the full story, and not just lie? For all we know, their sensitive "customer analytics" fields are not dumped when you make an information request, so you might only get a sanitized response?
- nasmorn 13y agoEvery person in the chain signs an agreement that they will serve jail time if it is found out you did it. Kinda makes it hard for companies to have their employees lie for them on this
- scott_karana 13y ago
- gojomo 13y agoI'd guess it was the result of a manual data-entry error after a previous telemarketing call. A rep meant to press a 'remove' button, adding a note - but the note wound up instead as an address line of a still-active entry.
- userbinator 13y agoMy guess is that "daughter killed in car crash" ended up in the field where someone's position would usually go.
- userbinator 13y agoReminds me of this: http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/bastard.asp
- corobo 13y agoThis is why I don't even put sarky comments in code.. Funny but not lose your job funny
- lozf 13y agoThat's worse than the time Amazon emailed me with the subject line: "I hope you die soon."
- car 13y agoThis is about human dignity, and it's just disgusting. I'd be ashamed to work at OfficeMax or any of those data collection firms. "Retail giant Target reportedly knows how to use its data to identify pregnant customers, and it recently lost tens of millions of customers' credit and debit card information to hackers, among other data." "Gatherers of consumer data also are reportedly selling off lists of rape victims and AIDS and HIV patients, a privacy group told Congress in December." I shudder thinking about what kind of information about all of us is being collected and sold, without any recourse. And corporate interests are keeping better privacy laws from getting passed. So the can squeeze the maximum profit from consumer cattle. All of us working in 'big data' should think real hard what we deem ethically acceptable.
- cynwoody 13y agoThis nonsense been going on for decades. Back in the eighties, I came across a computer letter addressed to "Mr. Intl B. MacHines". Very simple. Upper-case garbage in, mixed-case garbage out! Printed using a mylar ribbon, so it looked like it was typed on an eighties executive office typewriter. (At the time, computer output was usually upper case and of lesser print quality, thus the mylar ribbon deception.)
- eloff 13y agoI couldn't even read the story on my Nexus. It amazes me that I was bombarded with three popup ad dialogs, the last of which replaced the original page somehow. On the latimes website!?!
- pm 13y agoI've seen something like this happen before, where a person registered an offensive phrase as a business name on a mailing list and was getting mail for it because no-one bothered to check the name. The fact that the mail was qualified with "... or current business" suggests a similar possibility (it really wouldn't be hard to register a place of business on Google Maps as "Daughter Killed In Car Crash" at his address). The corollary is that someone out there's a real fucking asshole.