William Heath’s blog

Here’s a reply from Orange which came in yesterday:

Dear Sirs

Your Client: Wiliam Heath
Account Number: xxx

I write further to your fax dated 3rd June 2009, the contents of which are noted. As set out in my previous correspondence, points 1-3 of my offer of settlement were offered purely as a gesture of goodwill, on a strictly without admission of liability basis.

I am willing however to arrange for written confirmation to be provided to your client, which will confirm the actions taken in respect of our records, your client’s credit file, and confirmation of any cessation of actions by debt collection agencies. Therefore I would reiterate our offer of settlement, purely as a gesture of goodwil, to bring an end to this matter:-

1. We are prepared to waive the outstanding balance on the account, which
currently stands at £83.49;

2. We are prepared to terminate the account with no further penalties;

3. We are prepared to amend your client’s credit file and arrange for any collections actions to cease; we will also write to you/your client confirming the actions taken;

4. We are prepared to offer your client the sum of £150.00 purely as a gesture of goodwilL. This can be by way of cheque or by way of account credit to your client’s existing account.

We believe the above offer of monetary settement is reasonable in the circumstances, and would reflect any reasonable legal costs incurred by your client in this matter. You have not provided us with any detail of the legal work undertaken by your firm on behalf of your client, and as such i am unable to offer any further sum in compensation for legal costs.
Please contact the writer in writing should your client wish to accept this offer.

Yours faithfully

Right. So they’ll confirm in writing they’ll stop pursuing me and that they’ve corrected my records, but not apologise. Their view of “reasonable legal costs” falls a long way short of “realistic legal costs”.

UPDATE: further letter:

Purely in an attempt to resolve this matter without incurring further costs for either party, we would be willing to offer your client the sum of £250.00 in full and final settlement of his claim in respect of costs. This offer is made without admission of liability and purely as a gesture of goodwill.

I dont think Orange’s own solicitors would pick up the cudgels to turn round a threatening bureaucratic juggernaut for £250, let alone for £150. I may be wrong. I can always ask Olswangs I suppose.

So, lots of talk about goodwill, but I’m hours and hours and hundreds of pounds out of pocket on this basis, plus I fel I’ve been both ignored and bullied. So I’m far from satisfied. With such treatment how can they expect that there will still be an “existing account” to which to apply this modest credit?

You may recall where we got to with Orange, my long-term mobile phone services supplier which started threatening me and invoking debt collectors and damaged credit reputation after someone else took out a mobile phone contract in my name.

After months of trying to get them to listen Orange’s offer of settlement made no apology, did nothing to confirm they would undo the damage they had done, and threatened to leave me hundreds of pounds out of pocket as a “goodwill gesture”.

So the solicitors sent them another letter:

We write further to your letter of 14 May 2009. We note that Orange is now at last, albeit somewhat curmudgeonly, prepared to start to acknowledge our client’s rightful complaint.

While on one level Orange might consider it sufficient to rely on documents at face value when first presented, it is not a position that the company can or should cling to for several months once it has been put on notice that our client has been the victim of impersonation, particularly when he has been a loyal and very long standing customer of Orange.

In further support of our client’s case, we enclose: first a copy of a letter from the Co-operative Bank confirming that our client reported the loss of his Co-op debit card and personal ID to the bank on 20 August 2008 and the bank immediately blocked the lost debit card; and second, a signed affidavit that our client was seen by [xxx and yyy] along with many other people in Hambledon Surrey on the day in question, and was therefore not in Oxford Street taking out a second mobile phone contract.

While our client is willing to accept the proposals offered at numbered points 1-3 inclusive in your letter these do not go far enough.

Your proposals provide some long overdue relief to our client that Orange is now prepared to stop: wrongly pursuing him for monies to which it is not entitled; breaching the Data Protection Act by storing incorrect information about him; and without justification defaming him by publishing false and damaging information about our client to debt collectors and credit reference agencies. However, the terms of settlement need to more accurately reflect the damage caused and requirement to correct the false, illegal and damaging steps taken by Orange.

Therefore, in addition to the remedies listed at points 1-3 inclusive in your letter our client also requires:

1.an unequivocal written apology from Orange;

2.written confirmation that Orange has corrected its own records and the records of any debt collection and credit reference agencies to which Orange may have passed false and defamatory information (to include evidence from the agencies that they have rectified their records); and

3.payment in full of our client’s legal costs in this matter. These amount to £1000 plus VAT.

Orange’s proposed “goodwill payment” of £50 is woefully inadequate in the circumstances. Although Orange must deal with numerous instances of fraud every year, our client was clearly a victim of impersonation himself. He did not seek to defraud Orange. Orange had the opportunity to take our client’s position seriously when he first notified the company of this matter. Instead it treated his complaint with little more than contempt. It was only once we were instructed did Orange’s stance change, albeit with obvious reluctance. Because of Orange’s intransigence and persistent failure to act on our client’s several attempts to alert Orange to fraudulent activity, our client has been forced to incur significant costs, and spent many hours himself dealing with what should have been a straightforward matter. It should be borne in mind that our client is not presently seeking compensation in terms of damages or in respect of his own extremely valuable time spent on this matter, all of which was avoidable.

As you know, under the Communications & Internet Services Adjudication Scheme (CISAS), Orange could be required to pay our client up to £5,000. Until such time as our client demands are completely satisfied, he reserves his rights in full, both generally and in relation to referring this matter to CISAS.

Please respond to this letter urgently so that this matter may be concluded.

Yours faithfully

So. Will this do the trick do you think? Meanwhile I’ve written to the lovely Ask Anna at The Guardian.

Following the example of the Iranian football team the Twitterverse is turning green. What do the Mullahs make of that I wonder? Tweeting against fundamentalism and old-fashioned cockocracy. When I went into the sector in 1982 nobody told me that mixing government and IT would end up with a global community tickling dictatorships to death.

I’ve posted to the Ctrl-Shift blog the text of my GCLive talk today. It was potentially awkward having to chair the session as well as make a strong contributution, but Toby from EPG, Sureyya from Intellect and John from the Home Office were unfazed and supportive.

What I said further develops the VRM and “volunteered personal information” ideas of Doc Searls, Adriana Cronin-Lukas, Iain Henderson and Alan Mitchell. Iain, Alan and I have been working on these for Mydex and Ctrl-Shift, and I’m trying to apply that thinking to the UK public sector.

I think “volunteered personal information” does a great deal to solve the deep-rooted cost, efficacy and trust problems of Transformational Government.

Toby’s talk challenged our assumptions about gathering and sharing data, about a “push” model for services rather than “pull”, and about not playing the national security/serious crime/child protection “trumps” in every government IT trick.

Sureyya acknowlegded trust in goverment’s handling of personl data was “broken” but pointed to the action taken in reviews, reports, best practice guidance and new senior bodies. This owuld take time, but information sharing had benefits.

I wish I could link to John’s talk, but it was off-the-cuff. He described, as Home Office commercial director, his experience of the PA data loss: the human cost, the commercial and contractual fallout, and how unfair the media can sometimes seem. But I was uneasy at his conclusion which was that he wanted everyone to be mindful at all times of the penalties and consequences of data losses, just like CCTV ads on buses make potential wrongdoers think again.

I can see what he means, but I want a different culture change. Let’s design out the risk, and place responsiblity for personal data as far as possible in the hands of individuals where it belongs, and let’s equip them far better to look after it.

Over at the blog of my new company Ctrl-Shift I’ve tried to explain how much better public services could be if we looked after our own information ourselves to a far greater extent. It’s an attempt to cross-fertilise contempory thinking about user-centred identity management and personal data management with years of concern about the direction of “transformational government” and the surveilance society/database state.

It comes from looking (prompted by Adriana) at the work of Doc Searls on VRM, and working with Iain Henderson and Alan Mitchell on creating a sustainable institution with a utility that delivers the basic VRM service - Mydex - and with Alan and Liz Brandt on researching and understanding and offering advice on what it all means: Ctrl-Shift. All that after 18 years researching and trying to make sense of the market for computerisation of public services as founder of Kable, now part of GNM and with which I remain happily associated.

The paradox is that the VRM change is a bit involved and abstruse both technically and legally, yet pleasing to common sense and to everyone’s innate sense of dignity and social justice. The basic idea is very simple yet the scale and complexity of its implications for our vast public bureaucracy is mind-boggling. It should be easy to grasp but it proves wholly counterintuitive for anyone involved in creating and reinforcing the status quo in computerised public sevices.

Yet it affects us all, so it ought to be easily and universally explicable. Anyway, do have a look and very glad of your comments. I shall be speaking about this at the GCExpo in Earls Court next week under some title like:The right way to share data”.

Nigel Tufnell on the demise of the record industry:

“What do you mean? No, it’s not going wrong at all. That’s what you don’t understand. It’s going right. This is what you don’t know. That’s where you’re stupid, you see. You don’t get it at all. You look around and see something, I see a different thing. My thing happens to be right. I see great promise.”

Here’s a final draft article I’ve done for a Quaker booklet on civil liberties. Very grateful for comments while there’s still time. Read the rest of this entry »

After a weekend of no broadband (I use Zen as ISP, with BT as wholesaler) I have to confess it’s not all bad. BT had extensive faults over the weekend, but did fix them. And Zen’s phone support is excellent (I had some router glitch that prevented me getting back on top of things immedaitely).

Interesting that I Tweeted my frustration. And got this today form @BTCare

@williamheath Can I look into that for you? If you DM me some details, I’ll get right on it.

That feels curiously responsive for one of life’s megacorporations. The profile details are

Have a question? Follow us and let us help!
Location: Newcastle, UK
Time Zone: London
Joined: Mon 27 Apr 2009 13:13
Following: 326
Followers: 214
Updates: 305
Favorites: 0
Friend: No
Notifications: No
Protected: No
Web: http://www.bt.com/help
Twitter: twitter.com/BTCare

Fascinating. Where does this lead, I wonder? And is a path Orange will follow?

Background: Orange has since December wanted to bill me for a contract fraudulently taken out in my name using a stolen drivers’ licence and cancelled debit card. They put put debt collectors on the case and threatened to damage my credit rating. After a lawyers’ letter they last week finally acknowledged my concern, though not their own wrongdoing. They’ve offered to stop chasing me for this money and to “amend my credit file” plus a £50 goodwill gesture, with no apology or guarantee all records have been corrected.

I’ve put a great deal of time into trying to correct their error, plus hundreds of pounds in costs. I’ve now got confirmation from the bank that my debit card was cancelled, and an affidavit from people I was with in Hambledon on the day the phone contract was taken out in Oxford Street.

Orange said this is for the police to sort out; the police owe me a reply to a letter asking for help on this. There’s an outstanding subject access request on Orange for my own legitimate account and any data relating to me icw the fraudulent account.

Well, for me goodwill starts once Orange have paid the legal costs I’ve incurred. It continues with a written apology and confirmation that their own records have been corrected, and that they’ve informed their debt collectors and credit reference partners. If I haven’t actually lost out financially (not counting all the time and grief I’ve had to put into this) and they acknowledge what a long-standing customer feels like when treated this way then I can get back to a “well they’re no worse than any of the others” level of normal customer dissatisfaction.

So we’re going to have to send them the next legal letter I fear. They’re in a bit of a hole. They may have stopped digging in the sense that they now offer to stop defaming me. They may also have stopped digging in the sense that if they’ve corrected their records then I guess this ends their breach of the DPA (though they don’t acknowledge that they did break this law, or indeed any error of any sort). But they’re still open to being pursued under their own code of conduct CISAS for being intransigent and unresponsive and taking so bloody long to sort this out (there’s a three-month limit).

I’d have some sympathy. I didnt wish this on them; the risk of impersonation is an annoying thing to have to manage; they want to issue new contracts without onerous checks. But they’ve handled this badly. As I say, I would have some sympathy if I weren’t so annoyed with them, and out of pocket to boot.