What Journalists Don't Understand About Consumer Privacy Laws
The Oct. 29 New York Times has a story about a T-Mobile customer whose cell phone was stolen when they were traveling outside of the U.S. for work. The customer immediately reported the phone as stolen, but still got hit with a $25,000 phone bill.
The customer and the reporter were wondering exactly how that could have happened. All good questions, but what the reporter doesn't understand is that privacy laws prohibit what that T-Mobile spokesperson can say about the incident.
Even though the customer share a copy of his invoice with the New York Times, privacy laws prohibit T-Mobile from answer questions about it.
And I can tell you, when you're the PR person handling a reporter's questions, journalists tend to believe you're lying when you say this. They're asking very reasonable questions and they're not sure why you don't answer them.
The truth is you can't.
The other thing you can't do is dispute what a customer has told a reporter. So when the reporter has heard only one side of the story, it's difficult for them to do their job.
In this particular instance, where the $25,000 bill was incurred in three days, T-Mobile's lawyers did allow the PR representative to say that bill skyrocketed because the thieves used it for conference calling, but that's all the PR rep. was allowed to say.
So here's what else the reporter and the readers of this story don't likely understand. In this case, the T-Mobile system detected the fraud and automatically shut off the phone before the customer reported the phone as stolen.
So why did the T-Mobile billing system still issue an invoice? My guess is the fraud detection system isn't integrated with the billing system and I'm betting that the billing cycle for the customer coincided with the false charges. (And I bet integrating the systems would cost tens of millions of dollars to complete.)
So when the customer called Care, I'm betting that the poor care rep. was just doing their job and didn't escalate the customer to a manager who could have investigated further, and realize that invoice was issued in error.
All that said, that's just my guess.
I don't believe anyone at T-Mobile ever expected that bill to be paid and I'm sure the PR person wanted desperately to tell the reporter the whole story, but privacy laws prohibited that from happening.
In fairness to T-Mobile, the customer was not held responsible for the bill. But I do have to wonder, if the reporter knew a bit more about the privacy laws that govern the wireless industry, as well as the complex wireless billing systems, would he still have chosen to write this story?
