Woman sues Rogers for exposing her affair through phone bill
Nagy claims a unilateral decision by Rogers to consolidate her household’s bills allowed her husband to discover she was having an affair. That, she says, led to the “destruction” of her marriage.
She is suing the telecommunications giant for $600,000, claiming invasion of privacy and breach of contract. None of the allegations have been proven in court.
Okay, so I know it's really hard to drum up much sympathy for her. Perhaps it's poetic justice, etc. But even if the issue wasn't an affair, I'd be really pissed off if my cell phone bill was suddenly "consolidated" with other household bills.
People don't necessarily just live with spouses. They also live with parents and adult children and roommates. There could be all sorts of reasons that you want your cell phone bills to remain private from other people in the house. Maybe you like to call a 1-900 number. Maybe you are dating someone that you don't want your parents or siblings to know about. Maybe you receive collect calls from someone in jail. Or from your birth parents and you don't want your adoptive parents to know. Or maybe you're NOT having an affair but you are friends with someone that your overly-jealous spouse THINKS you're having an affair with, so you only communicate over your cell phone. Or maybe you're having an affair and you really don't want your spouse to find out, because you're not ready to leave yet and things just aren't happening as neatly and tidily as they're supposed to. Who knows?
Or maybe you're living with an abuser and your only lifeline is your cell phone, and your abusive spouse suddenly either a) realizes you have a cell phone when the bills get consolidated, or b) realizes you're calling unfamiliar numbers, perhaps for help. Guess you're fucked now, right? Thanks, Rogers!
The point is, privacy is privacy. Cell phones are private, and should be billed separately unless requested otherwise by the customer.
With the greatest of respect, Michelle, this woman is an idiot, and that's based on only hearing her side of the story. You don't even know if anyone consented to the consolidation of the phone bills - do you?
The best part of the story is her Facebook supporters:
Amen.
ETA: Whoopsie - can Nagy sue me for calling her an idiot? What about rabble's liability? I'm calling my lawyer and I'll be right back to you with a legal opinion.
Do you really think she consented to her cell phone bill being added to the main household phone bill, knowing as she did that her husband would see the numbers she was calling? I somehow doubt it.
Listen, I'm not saying she's a sympathetic figure. I'm saying that unless the person who owns the cell phone consents to having their bill, which includes all the numbers they're phoning, consolidated with the rest of the household bills from the same company, then it's a breach of privacy to do so.
It's pretty basic - just because you're living in the same house as someone, just because you're even married to someone, doesn't mean that anyone should automatically assume that you're fine with them looking through your bills and your finances and your mail.
Actually, this reminds me of a story. I used to work at a local phone card company. Not Bell or Rogers, I'm talking one of these small operations that do the phone cards you buy in the stores with good rates to various targeted countries.
Anyhow, so one day I get a call from someone who has a phone card that was bought in a store. The card has been used up, and she wants to know what numbers have been called on it. Now, as it turned out, I could request this from the system for our phone card account plans (where people had a monthly account on the same phone card number) but I couldn't pull up the data from the throw-away ones you buy in the store.
So I put her on hold and go to my boss and ask him whether I can get a report on the phone numbers called from the phone card. He says no. I tell him, but this lady is really adamant about it. He chuckles and says, "No, absolutely not. Go take the call and come back and I'll explain." So I tell her no, I'm sorry, I can't access records from store-bought phone cards.
I go to the boss for explanation and he says to me, "It could be her husband's card - she might have found it in his wallet or back pocket and wants to see if he is having an affair." My jaw dropped. (Hey, I was in my early 20's, a newlywed, and completely idealistic.) He laughed, and told me that lots of people having affairs use throw-away phone cards so their calls can't be traced.
Agree with your synopsis Michelle, it is a privacvy issue if she did not agree to the consolidation, which it seems so, as the reports says "Rogers unilaterally decided".
Ok, let me put it differently:
What exactly do you know about how her cell phone was being billed? Whose name was it in? It may have been her cell, but her spouse's name on the account. I find it very hard to believe that Rogers consolidated separate accounts with different names on them. Here's what she said:
Whose name was on the billing address for the "global" invoice? Both of them? Is that what Rogers did? Or was there just one name on two separate bills beforehand?
The whole typically uninformative media story doesn't even ask, let alone answer, these questions. They just report on her lawsuit and her side of the story, with exactly one sentence devoted to Rogers' statement of defence.
Okay, if you're having an affair and you're going to use your cell phone and you don't want your spouse to see the phone calls on the bill, are you going to do it in an account that's under your spouse's name? I highly doubt it!
Perhaps both the family landline phone and her cell phone were under HER name. Still, that doesn't mean they should combine them!
Let's use my household as an example. Currently, our home phone is under radiorahim's name (because he lived here first and I moved in). We haven't added my name to the home phone and probably won't bother. My cell phone is with the same company as his home phone. Both are billed to the same address but to different names.
But I would fully expect that, if we DID decide to add my name to the home phone bill account, that they would not just unilaterally decide to merge my cell phone bill with the home phone because, oh well, Michelle's name is on both accounts so it must be okay. Because if a bill is under my name only, then technically, it is none of radiorahim's business. Now, as it turns out, I couldn't care less if radiorahim looks at my cell phone bills, and they're all filed in the same place as the rest of the household bills. But it's the principle of the thing. Marriage or cohabitation does not mean you give up your right to privacy.
If both phones were under her name, how would her spouse get to see the combined bill?
And if you're going to have an affair and use your cell phone, and have the bills delivered to your home, and your spouse happens to open a phone bill addressed to you... whom will you sue then for $600,000?
Until I hear - or read - that Rogers combined two accounts with different names on them into one bill (with whose name on it??), I will be unimpressed that anyone's privacy was attacked here. And my "idiot" slander remains intact.
And if I did decide to look at Michelle's cellphone bill I'd probably find that 90% of the calls were to me ;)
Mind you I have a Rogers billing department horror story of my own from a few years ago. If I can ever stop spitting nails long enough whenever I think of that time, I might share my story here.
Hmm...pretty confident guy, aren't you? ;)
Yeah, that Rogers story is pretty awful. Maybe that's why I'm taking this woman's story at face value.
You can't. She's wearing a wig and fake glasses.
Heh, true! :)
And I have to eat crow. I dug out my last cell phone bill and it turns out he was right. Good thing I didn't bet anything!
Who were the other 10% of the calls to?
Wouldn't you like to know. ;)
Is it you, Unionist?
link
Holy crap. That's something else! Thanks for that, RevolutionPlease.
I mean, even if there was no reason to keep it secret, that's just offensive.
But it could also be dangerous. I'll refer back to my example of a woman trying to leave an abusive spouse and perhaps using her cell phone to make exit plans.
And even better:
Exactly what I was thinking. Or even contacting friends and family that an abusive spouse considers interfering outside meddlers.
Jebus, I didn't know you could just phone up Rogers and get people's e-mail passwords. How handy!
I'm just flabbergasted. So my household mirrors this woman's exactly when it comes to billing for our phones. I have a cell phone in my own name (maiden, of course) with the same provider as our home phone, which is in radiorahim's name.
If we were with Rogers, they might have already "consolidated" my cell phone bill into his home phone bill just based on our address information.
I tell you, I would be livid if that happened.
Ahh...but Rogers is fully capable of invoking "privacy" when it suits them.
My previous spouse was hospitalized and subsequently died in 2007.
The one household bill that was solely in her name was the cable TV bill.
After she was hospitalized, I'd paid the last cable TV bill and then called Rogers in attempt to get them to shut the cable off. Between daily hospital visits and all of the kinds of stuff you go through when you have a dying family member I wasn't exactly spending that much time watching TV and didn't see any need to fork out money to Rogers for something I wasn't using.
But Rogers refused to turn my cable off unless my spouse requested it.
I explained my spouse's incapacity to call them blah blah blah...but nope...they wouldn't. They asked if I had a "power of attorney"...at the time I didn't have one...when you're a bit younger you don't exactly prepare for this kind of situation.
Anyway, I told them that we were joint owners of the house, that this was a service "to the house", my spouse was in no position to pay cable TV bills, that I was the only person who could possibly pay the bills and that I wouldn't pay any more money to Rogers because I no longer wanted their service. Therefore, they should shut the damned service off.
I subsequently got a bill for something like $160 and I didn't pay it. Rogers accounts department called me from time to time about paying this bill and I told them the same story. I kept telling them that I wasn't going to pay a bill for a service that I didn't want and that I'd asked them to shut off.
After a couple of months or so of this the "collection agency" calls started. In fact the collection agency calls started even before Rogers shut the service off! At first they were the "cagey" type where they'd ask for my spouse about a supposed "personal matter"...and I'd tell them basically where to go. You have to bear in mind that all during this time my spouse's health continued to deteriorate.
Finally, I got one really nasty "barely legal" call at 7:10 am on a weekday morning. (7:00 am is the earliest you can be called by a collection agency on a weekday in Ontario). I told them that this bill wasn't going to be paid and if they wanted anything they'd have to sue and that I'd be happy to tell the whole story to a judge. The message I got in essence from the collection agency scumbag amounted to them saying that they were going to keep hounding me (or my dying spouse) for the $160.
So, I ended up calling the Ministry of Consumer & Commercial Relations and the person I spoke to there was extremely helpful. They basically told me to send the collection agency a registered letter telling them that I was "disputing" the debt, quoting the appropriate section of the Collection Agencies Act. I did this and have never heard a thing about this bill again.
But Rogers has lost a customer permanently...and I mean permanently.
When I originally decided to shut it off my thought was that whenever life settled down that I might turn it on again. But after this experience all I can say is FUCK ROGERS!!!!
I've alluded to this story in other posts about telecom conglomerates before, but never been able to pull it together enough to write it down. I'm just that angry that I was "kicked" at a very bad time in my life by Rogers.
It always seems to be when you are down that these types of companies like to kick you the most. Ive had a similar experience as well.
Wow, radiorahim! One of my workmates has a nearly identical story: his wife died of cancer last year, and he cancelled the cable service. They wouldn't let him cancel it unless they heard from his wife. My workmate is a blunt and pugnacious guy - he says his response was, "You want to talk to my wife? Get a shovel." After months of aggravation, during which the bill went over $200, he managed to talk to somebody high enough in the organization who was able to make it all go away.
Wow, that's a horrible story, radiorahim. What a bunch of assholes.
With regards to the OP, I don't think you need to consider the implications of what this sort of action means for an abused spouse, etc. (although obviously that adds a darker edge to this story); any adult has the right to carry on an affair. If Rogers breaches any individual's privacy and as a result of that breach, their privacy is negatively affected, I'd say their culpable. I don't know about $600K (must have been an enjoyable affair!) but if Rogers is going to play fast and loose with privacy they deserve to get dinged. The added details (stolen voicemail passwords, different surnames) don't exactly cover Rogers with glory either.
You know, this reminds me of my student loan I got with a small credit union. I joined it because my wife had been going there for years and decided I'd prefer them to a big bank when I needed a new loan. I missed a payment one month and they took it out of my wife's account without asking either of us! And we have different names, of course. We weren't too happy about that.
That was brutal of them, rr, and maybe verging on legally challenged? I read it with a lot of empathy, and I'll store up the word about Rogers (not that I'm much fonder of Bell).
LOL Catchfire. I had CIBC take 300 out of my account (twice) to cover the bounced check of another Bacchus in another province. Since he had no money they simply found another Bacchus somewhere else to cover it. I had payments bounce because of it and my branch manager had to write apologies to the companies (twice) and cover the NSF charges and return the money. Plus she had to lock my account from transfers otherwise it would have happened again
I once had a collection agency bugging me about an alleged debt that was more than 10 years old, and which I maintained was bogus. With a few calls I managed to find out the name and home phone # of the president of the collection agency. I called him and left a voice mail saying that I would continue calling his home at all hours unless his company stopped calling me. End of story.
Michelle (amazing woman that she is...why I'm madly in love with her) has been encouraging me to post this story for a long time...just haven't been able to...because it "triggers" me.
But whatever the case with this woman and her lawsuit, I hope she's successful...if only because my own experience with Rogers was so nasty...so bureaucratically evil.
A bureaucrat does not see the wider world around him/her, they merely see the rules to enforce and model their behavior on that basis. Usually with an eye to promotion. The ones that buck this trend tend to either stay on the lower levels of the bureaucracy (and thus powerless) or burn out and leave.
Yes Minister very adequately illustrates this while making fun of it and its not for nothing that new MPs in the UK (at least when labour came to power) were forced to watch the series.
Thanks for sharing, r-r.
I am ashamed by writers post. I should have said that as well
R-r thank you for sharing that and you should not have had to go thru that. Im sorry I didnt post that to begin with and thank writer for bringing it to my attention