Except 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.
I 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.
This 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.
I 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.
If 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.
The 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.
Dehumanizing - maybe, but the bigger issue in marketing imho is that it seems to be centered around finding more and more personal info about individuals. Most marketers seem to think that finding more personal info about customers can somehow turn into better sales.
Sadly, 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.
This 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.
I'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.
Maybe 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.
I 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.
Yes, 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!
If 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.
Why is the personal relationship "fake" just because it's made with a database instead of human memory? Because the company doesn't really care about the daughter? Would it be creepy if employees at a smaller store remembered a customer's daughter dying, and were sensitive to that fact, but didn't actually personally care about it?
The only relationship I can establish with a company is a contract. By definition, it takes other people to have an actual interpersonal relationship.
The information that the employees at a small store know about me comes from establishing a relationship with those employees, from natural, organic chatter with them. I share it with them, and they share stuff with me, to establish a rapport. If those people were to share those details with their colleagues specifically to try and target me for marketing action, I'd feel that our personal relationship was being taken advantage of for the sake of the commercial relationship, which would make me withdraw from the personal relationship.
In particular, when it comes to this sort of personal information ("my daughter died in a car crash"), this is the stuff you share with people you specifically trust, because you have an actual, preexisting relationship. It's something deeply personal, that you expect you can trust the other person to keep private. Not something you expect, or want, to be added to your client file.
Sure it belongs in a CRM: "Show some sensitivity when calling this customer, he lost his daughter in a car crash". Now when dealing with the customer, you know to steer general conversation away from children or vehicles, so as not to trigger bad memories. CRMs hold all sorts of notes like this, tucked away where the customer can't see them. It's the 'R' in CRM, after all.
Yep, none of their fucking business. Keep my personal life out of your DB and your sales pitch.
But OK, I understand how some people could see this as legitimate. However, are we in agreement that it is absolute not acceptable to sell this information to other companies?
'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.
It 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.
I 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.
There 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.")
The 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!
Someone 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.
patio11, you're usually right on the money, but not this time. While it is true that the programming mistake was probably small, the end result was catastrophic for these parents. I would ask you to step back and reevaluate your "take on consensual reality" in this case. And at what point did anyone consent to being marketed to as grieving parents?
Let me try to rephrase to tell you what I meant with that sentence, which I was attempting to phrase delicately. The reason why a line manager might not immediately say "It is probably true that someone claiming we addressed a letter to his deceased daughter means that we actually in fact addressed a letter to his deceased daughter" is because that line manager has to deal with many calls every month from people who are mentally disturbed. For example, I was once accused by a customer of being a CIA operative who hated Muslims because his pencils were late. His pencils had arrived on time.
Skepticism about the father's claim was a mistake, but it's not an inconceivable mistake to me. After anyone at OfficeMax had realized that the allegation was true, my ideal state of the world is that the CEO is on the phone within 5 minutes.
This is getting conflated with two other issues:
"Did OfficeMax actually intend to send this letter?" No. Of course not.
"Does OfficeMax having created a system which allows this letter to get sent mean that OfficeMax should fix the system?" Yes, OfficeMax should identify and fix the bug which allowed this to happen. In contrast to many people, I believe that the type of bug which caused this is likely rather minor. I would not agree that e.g. this letter is by itself a persuasive case that direct mail is evil, for example.
I have to disagree - this is hardly 'catastrophic'. A troublesome or even traumatic reminder, but a catastrophe? It's a pretty low bar for that word.
Somewhere along the line we got the idea that nothing negative must happen to us, and if it is, it's the worst thing ever. We're not that fragile. It's not a nice experience, but neither is it life-destroying.
I used to work in IT recruitment, and had CV's coming at me every day. One particular candidate popped up in my database search who possessed the rare skill that I was looking for. Her last CV in our system was 3 years old. Anyway, I called her up and asked if she might be still in that field. It turns out the call was made in likely timing. She had just been divorced and explained that she was looking to get back into the workforce after being a homemaker for the past 3 years. I added a note to the call log for other recruiters who may see her record saying "Great candidate, gap in work history due to marriage. Now divorced and wanting to get back get back into the industry. Definitely worth interviewing!".
Now lets imagine that the agency I worked for was sold/aquired at some point and eventually resulted in a mailout being performed on the database.
You can imagine the result if the comment field was accidentally included in the mail-merge, or some substring of it;
"Dear Great candidate, gap in work history due to marriage. Now divorced and wanting to get back get back into the industry, have you considered funeral insurance?"
Pattio11's point is quite valid.
Edit: Sorry, hit the wrong 'reply' button. This post was meant for the parent
Agree, in fact if this happened to me - given that I work with some of the systems that could give rise to such things - I would probably be more amused and curious to find out what happened, than angry. ("How did you even know that...?")
This is not "dehumanizing and degrading data". Organisations collect this sort of data all the time, precisely because not knowing usually has far worse consequences. I used to work in telesales and we logged this sort of data all the time, because it helped us avoid horrible and embarrassing faux-pas - selling adventure holidays to someone with a tetraplegic child, selling life insurance to someone with a terminal illness etc. We logged it because the customer wanted us to log it. The obvious counter-argument is that nobody should ever use any form of outbound direct marketing under any circumstances, but that's just not going to happen.
This is an unfortunate edge-case of a database error that would be merely annoying or amusing in 99.999% of circumstances, but it's not an argument for never collecting this sort of data. The alternative is a sort of institutional amnesia in which the organisation is simply incapable of behaving sensitively because they don't know that there is anything to be sensitive about.
For 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.
I'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.
I 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?
Every 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
I'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.
This 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.
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.)
I 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!?!
I'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.
71 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] thread> ... 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.
This is disgusting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The information that the employees at a small store know about me comes from establishing a relationship with those employees, from natural, organic chatter with them. I share it with them, and they share stuff with me, to establish a rapport. If those people were to share those details with their colleagues specifically to try and target me for marketing action, I'd feel that our personal relationship was being taken advantage of for the sake of the commercial relationship, which would make me withdraw from the personal relationship.
In particular, when it comes to this sort of personal information ("my daughter died in a car crash"), this is the stuff you share with people you specifically trust, because you have an actual, preexisting relationship. It's something deeply personal, that you expect you can trust the other person to keep private. Not something you expect, or want, to be added to your client file.
But OK, I understand how some people could see this as legitimate. However, are we in agreement that it is absolute not acceptable to sell this information to other companies?
'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.
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.")
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.
Skepticism about the father's claim was a mistake, but it's not an inconceivable mistake to me. After anyone at OfficeMax had realized that the allegation was true, my ideal state of the world is that the CEO is on the phone within 5 minutes.
This is getting conflated with two other issues:
"Did OfficeMax actually intend to send this letter?" No. Of course not.
"Does OfficeMax having created a system which allows this letter to get sent mean that OfficeMax should fix the system?" Yes, OfficeMax should identify and fix the bug which allowed this to happen. In contrast to many people, I believe that the type of bug which caused this is likely rather minor. I would not agree that e.g. this letter is by itself a persuasive case that direct mail is evil, for example.
Somewhere along the line we got the idea that nothing negative must happen to us, and if it is, it's the worst thing ever. We're not that fragile. It's not a nice experience, but neither is it life-destroying.
Now lets imagine that the agency I worked for was sold/aquired at some point and eventually resulted in a mailout being performed on the database.
You can imagine the result if the comment field was accidentally included in the mail-merge, or some substring of it;
"Dear Great candidate, gap in work history due to marriage. Now divorced and wanting to get back get back into the industry, have you considered funeral insurance?"
Pattio11's point is quite valid.
Edit: Sorry, hit the wrong 'reply' button. This post was meant for the parent
This is an unfortunate edge-case of a database error that would be merely annoying or amusing in 99.999% of circumstances, but it's not an argument for never collecting this sort of data. The alternative is a sort of institutional amnesia in which the organisation is simply incapable of behaving sensitively because they don't know that there is anything to be sensitive about.
>We logged it because the customer wanted us to log it.
So customers actually requested that you collect personal information on them?
"My kid can't walk, so I'm not interested. Please don't try to sell me this again."
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.
Why are they using another companies mailing list? What's wrong with theirs?
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.
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?
"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.
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.)
The corollary is that someone out there's a real fucking asshole.