Broke and Desperate RadioShack Wants to Sell Your Info to Highest Bidder
RadioShack died this year but its icy hand still holds the social security numbers of millions of customers—information they promised to keep to themselves. Noble! And bullshit!
Via the Guardian, the ‘Shack’s attorneys are reportedly looking to sell everything not nailed down in the wake of the company’s bankruptcy filings—including your name, contact information, social security number and anything else you were dumb enough to give them in exchange for a shitty warranty.
The highly sensitive information (SSNs and the like) is retained at stores for two years and then purged. Less sensitive purchase records were expunged after three years in some cases, but RadioShack kept them “indefinitely” if customers bought a warranty, so if you bought insurance on your television in 1998, RadioShack remembers.
Now the company is trying to determine how much it will be able to legally sell in an effort to keep creditors at bay. It has decided emails and addresses are probably what it wants to sell, specifically “67 million customer name and physical mailing address files together with any associated transaction data collected by the Debtors within the five (5) year period prior” to its bankruptcy, according to a recommendation by the company’s attorney, Elise Frejka.
The FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection is reportedly NOT a fan of this plan, pointing out that RadioShack’s privacy policy explicitly promises to protect personally identifiable information.
Desperate times though, man...
