"Zero balance due now!" shouted davethepirate "To be fair, I had disputed a charge on a bill and they finally relented which should have actually resulted in them owing me $1.01, but I'm happy with the win." I'm sure yarr.
This beats Cory Booker," commented nja for reasons I don't begin to understand. "This show is damned good, and there sure is a lot to say on the matter, but 419,951 more hours?"
"What an effective CAPTCHA," cooed Peter G. "They forgot to ask for doodles, sign language, and squirrel noises." I think the trick here is that if you actually DO manage it correctly, they know you're a robot.
"Eight Characters means what, again??" cried Mark R. For myself, I'm ecstatic they used "symbol" instead of "special character".
"For the past several years, I've enjoyed free identity theft monitoring as a result of multiple data breaches of various third-party services. That's finally running out now, but I'm not sure if it's in 30 days or in 5 days," grumbles Adam R.
Which brings us to the let's talk about me portion of this
episode.
This week, I received
a letter from the University of Phoenix, by whom I
briefly was employed TEN YEARS AGO,
informing me that various bits of sensitive personal data
had been leaked in their Oracle EBS breach last year.
By way of apology, they offered me
one of these almost useless subscriptions.
By now, everyone must have three or four of these
"complimentary one-year subscriptions" simultaneously. The
vendors of these services know that a significant
portion of the breached public never bother to sign up. Cost: $0.
For those who do, it's a customer acquisition
funnel: this year is paid by [latest sloppy bungler] and then they
hit you up for a recurring premium.
I strongly suspect that the various "identity protection
services" come swarming out of the trees the moment they hear of some breach, and are very, very, competitive on price. How much do you suppose they pay for the new customer acquisition? Less than whatever statutory damages the UofP will have to pay the government?
Anybody who has first-hand knowledge of the terms of a post-breach contract for victim services, please let us know.
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This post originally appeared on The Daily WTF.