Sunday, March 17, 2013

Privacy Is A Priority


My daughter's family is flying to Hawaii for a visit.  For her birthday, I wanted to buy an airline gift certificate for them to use to get into a "premier" section of the plane with a little more legroom. 

When I contacted the airline, I was told that you couldn't use gift certificates for that kind of purchase.  (First imponderable here ... why not??). 

The helpful agent, however, said that I could do it myself by going into my daughter's reservation record. 

Really?  I didn't know the record locator.  The ever helpful agent said just give me her name and when you think she's traveling.  Voila.  She found and gave me the reservation record number ... and I purchased the better seats.

You might think that this is all well and good.  But, I'm afraid that in this day and age I worry about agents handing out private information like reservation records to just anyone.  (My daughter's married name is different from mine ... so there was no way for the agent to know that we were really related).

Companies need to be taking privacy concerns seriously - or they'll be finding the government at their door with a lot of troublesome regulations to make them take it seriously. 

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