Corporate Scum of the Day: Sprint
If you have the misfortune of doing business with Sprint, as I do, you may have long assumed that in an emergency, the GPS device built into your cell phone could be a lifesafer. Guess again. According to their current policy, if your kid ends up kidnapped along with your SUV and the cell phone happens to be inside it, Sprint won’t release the GPS data without a $25 fee and a subpoena. Aside from how sick it is not to honor the subscriber’s wishes without a subpoena, since when does anyone get to charge a fee in exchange for honoring one? Can private individuals do that, too? If so, effective immediately my new fee is $1,000,000, which ought to be more than enough to cover any early cancellation fees if I dump their service today.
Hat tip: Jeff Lewis.
January 14th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Yeah, subpoenees can charge their reasonable expenses. If someone tries to charge too much, a judge can smack them later. But yeah, anyone can charge.
January 14th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
A $25 fee is probably not unreasonable, so I guess they get a pass on that front. Mostly, I’m offended that they insisted on a subpoena at all. If the subscriber asks for the data, and agrees to pay the fee, that should be that. It’s not as though anyone else’s legitimate privacy interests were at stake.
January 16th, 2006 at 12:04 am
There’s nothing reasonable about a $25 fee for an operation that takes some minimum-wage flunky three minutes to perform. Unless they are charging for the lawyer to go over the subpoena.
I’ve been microboycotting Sprint for a decade now. They ripped me off for fourteen dollars and by my estimate it has now cost them around $2500 in subscriber fees.
Makes me feel good anyway.
January 16th, 2006 at 7:27 am
I just got a new phone and service from sprint. I have had it barely more than a month. I bought a PPC 6700 phone with EVDO service and asked several service people what the monthly service charge was. I was told that PCS Power Vision for $15 is all that is required. So I said sign me up! And they said, well it is free for the first month. I said I don’t care sign me up. So I got my new phone and started using it. I went to the Sprint web site on Dec 19 and all the details of my plan were there including the Power vision.
Today I got a bill from Sprint for data services over the first month I had my phone (When the Power Vision was supposedly free) for the amount of almost 300 dollars. I went online and every trace of the Power Vision plan had been removed from my account.
I took me two whole hours of being on the phone in order to get a person who claimed she could fix things… And she assured me that I would get a call within 72 hours confirming that the corrections have been made and the charges reversed.
That was Saturday at noon. So they ahve about a day to go…
Worst Service Ever!
January 16th, 2006 at 4:41 pm
Strangely enough, you can never believe what a phone company sales rep tells you … over the phone.