The IT Nerd

You’ll recall that a woman is suing Rogers for $600,000 claiming that Rogers exposed her affair by consolidating her Rogers cell phone bill with her now ex-husband’s  and that I didn’t think her chances of winning were all that high. The plaintiff held a news conference yesterday and claims that others have had the same issue that she has had with Rogers:

Wearing a black wig and sunglasses, Gabriela Nagy told a news conference Wednesday that two people have signed affidavits claiming their dalliances were discovered because of how the carrier bills its clients.

A third has signed an affidavit saying a privacy breach led to allegations of marital infidelity which have shaken his common-law marriage.

“Their lives have taken a downfall, loss of jobs, marriages. Some are almost carbon copies of my story. Others have other privacy issues that were breached,” said Ms. Nagy.

“The privacy issue is a lot more serious. It concerns not only me.”

Approximately one dozen people in all have contacted Ms. Nagy’s lawyers alleging various breaches of privacy by Rogers, she said.

Rogers for its part is standing by it’s story:

“Our customers’ privacy is very important to us. We take it very seriously,” said Rogers spokeswoman Odette Coleman in an e-mail Wednesday evening. “We are not aware of any other complaints of this nature.”

Ms. Coleman said Ms. Nagy and her husband wished to have all services consolidated onto a single bill when the couple called to add additional services to their account.

“We did not terminate Ms. Nagy’s contract or automatically consolidate these accounts. While we sympathize with Ms. Nagy’s situation, we cannot be responsible for the personal decisions made by our customers,” she said.

Seeing as people other than Ms. Nagy have a beef with Rogers in terms of having their bills merged without their permission, it means one of two things. Either Rogers has a serious problem in terms of privacy or we have a bunch of people jumping on the bandwagon hoping to score some quick cash. Given that a federal law called PIPEDA exists in Canada, it would be really bad for business if Rogers were to run afoul of that law. Granted, the law won’t slap them silly. But the optics of tripping over PIPEDA are really bad. Therefore I am tempted to continue to favor Rogers in this fight. Besides, I seriously doubt they’d be willing to go to court over this if they were in the wrong.

See you all in court!

This entry was posted on June 17, 2010 at 10:10 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Lawsuit, Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.