By: E&P Staff The Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette received thousands of calls from subscribers yesterday after the papers accidentally released customer credit card information. Attorney General Thomas Reilly announced he is reviewing the situation to see if the papers violated Massachusetts law, the Boston Globe reports.
By noon yesterday the papers, both owned by The New York Times Co., fielded 4,200 calls on a special hotline, according to a story in the Globe. By late afternoon, the center had taken 13,000 calls.
Yesterday the paper added 200 customer service reps to help.
"We remain hopeful that this information will not be misused," Globe Publisher Richard Gilman said in a statement. "But we want our customers to know that if any such thing does occur, we will provide them with means to correct the problem."
The newspapers are setting up a credit-monitoring service for those subscribers affected, free of charge for one year. Readers can go to
www.bostonglobe.com/cclookup to find out if their information was released.
On Tuesday, the papers said that credit and bank card data for 240,000 subscribers had been mistakenly distributed with Sunday Telegram & Gazette papers, though the number of subscribers affected is still unclear.
The Globe reported that 200 of the paper's subscribers canceled their subscriptions. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, for the September 2005 period, daily circulation at the Globe dropped 8.2% to 414,225 copies and Sunday circulation fell 7.8% to 652,146 copies compared to the same period during the previous year. Daily circulation at the Telegram & Gazette slipped 4.4% to 115,996 copies and Sunday declined 3% to 100,001 copies.
The news of the mishap comes at time when circulation departments across the country are trying to get subscribers to sign up for EZ Pay, a form of payment where the reader gives the paper credit or debit information. Payments are made upfront and subscribers tend to roll over their subscriptions. Usually, subscriber retention goes up with EZ Pay.
Peter Katz, a partner in the law firm of Day, Berry & Howard LLP and a specialist in privacy and data security, told the Globe, ''On average, businesses haven't quite followed through to taking serious steps to cut down on the loss of information. Businesses have come to think they own this information," he added. "But the bias has to be the other way, that it's not their property, they don't have any right to it, and they have to be careful with it."
Newspaper officials said they have put into place new practices to prevent future releases of personal information, such as adding a safeguard to the computer system so only the last four numbers of credit and debit cards can be printed.
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