DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Customers of SBC Communications — including Southwestern Bell, Ameritech, Pacific Bell, Nevada Bell, or in other words anyone who owns a telephone and lives in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, California, Nevada, or Connecticut — should be aware that your phone company is selling your calling history.

Wanting privacy doesn’t mean you have something to hide. SBC’s definition of CPNI, Customer Proprietary Network Information, lists the data SBC no longer consider private, including:

• Number and type of lines
• Current charges
• Long distance billing record
• Subscriptions to custom calling services (e.g., Caller ID)
• Bill summary - where, when and who you call

Here’s the confusing thing: the SBC privacy policy claims, honestly, SBC does not sell CPNI to unaffiliated third parties. But as David Lazarus points out in The devil’s in Pac Bell’s phone bill details, SBC is affiliated with many more companies than you’d care to share your calling history with.

P*B spokespeople call this a “family of companies.” It sounds warm and fuzzy… but that’s probably not the same feeling you get when your phone rings at dinnertime. Worse than that, telemarketers won’t have to guess that you’re home at dinnertime — they can look at your phone bill from last month and predict when you’re home. Don’t think there aren’t any patterns there; any halfway-intelligent burgler can scan a phone bill and draw conclusions about the homeowner’s schedule.

Lazarus wrote a followup article to explain the backlash from the first: Pac Bell strikes back. It notes that SBC/P*B’s phone reps are familiar with, and sensitive about the story. I experienced this firsthand when I called the Customer Service number (800-310-2355) and asked the rep if I could “opt out of the personal data-sharing that’s been in the news.” She forwarded me to an automated service — she wouldn’t help me personally, and would not give me the direct-dial number of the automated service. At the appropriate prompt I keyed in my phone number and 3-digit account-number extension, but then the system read me a failure message, something along the lines of “we were not able to assist you.” Then the line was disconnected.

I called 800-310-2355 again, navigated through to a human, and very politely requested to have my account flagged “private,” without mentioning the Lazarus story. The rep handled my request personally. I suppose the lesson here is that we’re allowed to opt out, but not if we admit to knowledge about the controversy.

It might also be possible to opt-out online at http://sbc-pacbell.com/rescpni. This might only work for California residents.

So you’ve moved to a new house, and a month later the junk-mail deluge begins. Ever wonder whose fault that is? Here’s the answer:

“HomeData is a nationwide compiler of data on new resident homeowners.”

I got a catalog today from a holiday-desperate seller of uninteresting gifts — all the same wine-themed junk sold at every winery in California — and while I’m on the topic of misguided inventory, let me say that “Wine & All That Jazz” does not sell any merchandise that bears any relation to jazz.

Anyway, back to the leeches at Homedata Corp. They compile dossiers on new homeowners and sell them as frequently as possible, with no care for the homeowners’ privacy or interests. Why? According to Homedata’s team of inept analysts,

• New homeowners are in a spending mood. Buying a new home is a positive event. Whenever a family undergoes a positive change of lifestyle event, they need to spend. (That’s right; I feel so good being eyeball-deep in debt that I just can’t wait for the next catalog to come. Excuse me while I go sit by the mailbox.)
• New homeowners are credit-worthy by definition. These families have been through an exhaustive credit process to qualify for a home loan. They are proud of their credit status and want to maintain a good credit rating. (And the way I would maintain my good credit rating is by spending a pile of cash on unsolicited catalog offers?)
• New homeowners have money. Many have retained equity from a previous home purchase (sic) and are very liquid. (Demonstrably false, at least in California, where new homeowners regularly need 2 mortgages and a family loan to get into any property that doesn’t sport a “Police — Do Not Cross” ribbon across the front porch.)

I’ve saved the most despicable for last:

• New homeowners have no mailbox clutter. With a new address, their names will not appear on other mailing lists for quite some time. You have the opportunity to reach these new customers first.

The last point proves that Homedata realizes what a nuisance they are. Homedata’s clients cause “mailbox clutter.” A reasonable person might think that a good solution to that problem is to not send unsolicited catalogs. But no, the marketing experts at Homedata recommend sending catalogs sooner than everybody else. Does that solution scale? No. Homedata’s customers are a pretty gullible lot to think that Homedata reserves this privilege just for them. I mean, how many catalogs — how many Homedata clients — does it take to cause mailbox clutter? Two, maybe three. So, all you Homedata customers, do you really think you’re one of the lucky few to send the first catalogs? Don’t bet on it.

The Homedata Corp’s contact page lists full contact information, should you wish to express your opinion of their business plan. By publishing their telephone number and mailing address, they appear to be inviting your comments, or indeed any business opportunities, special offers, promotions, or catalogs you may offer.

After all, they’re making money by selling your name.

Some friends bought a house in Santa Rosa, spitting distance from Annadel State Park. They’re doing a major remodel in the few days before they have to move in: new flooring, paint everywhere, new bathroom, on and an. We stopped by on Saturday to help out and were surprised to see a crew of six guys at work. I say this is surprising because I’ve been waiting two months for an electrician to even call me back, and yet my friend had managed to assemble a big work crew on a week’s notice. There was scarcely a place to park, what with the debris box (no relation) and pickup trucks and so on.

Along the side of the house were two ~25 sq. ft. concrete pads that were destined for the landfill. My friend, the new homeowner, had spent an hour earlier in the day trying to break out the smaller of the two pads. He’d managed to remove about 1/5th of it before he wore out. We surveyed it, thinking that renting powertools (e.g., a Bobcat) might be a less-exhausting approach.

But then I ran out of things to do, and the prospect of wailing away with a sledgehammer for a few minutes appealed to me. I borrowed a pair of ridiculous looking wrap-around rainbow-hued sunglasses for eye protection, hefted the sledgehammer, and proceeded to beat the snot out of the concrete. (In most cases, that’s just a figure of speech, but I did a double-take when the sledgehammer came down with a wet plop sound, and gobs of white goo sprayed out from the point of impact. Apparently, someone from the work crew had set the sledgehammer head in a mound of sheetrock mud.)

My friend thinks I went crazy, shattering my way through the remaining 4/5 of the concrete, but I think I was just high on endorphins. Also I was compensating for the dorky shades. And I was using muscle groups I don’t normally employ when I sit in my basement cave pecking away at an ergo-board designed specifically to limit movement to the barest minimum. I found a rhythm in pulling the weight overhead and slamming it down into the rock. It was tiring, but it felt good. And I realized I have a talent for demolition (another possible post-dot-com profession? Must start a list.).

Some guys would have worn work gloves for this task, but not me. Not because I’m so manly that I don’t need them, but because I left mine at home — I’d never have guessed I’d be making like a convict and breaking rock on a Saturday afternoon. And, probably, because I haven’t done enough yardwork in the past 10 years to remember that repeated motions with tool handles cause friction burns. So as you can imagine, I sprouted a blister on each hand (left palm, right thumb), and until they heal I’ll look as if I’d been trying to overzealously “rub one out,” as my buddy Andrew would say.

The wounds are painless, except when I inadvertently drip lemon juice on them at lunchtime. The real pity is that we didn’t attack the second concrete pad too — so my friend will end up renting tools after all.

Here’s a San Francisco traffic quiz: On a five-lane, one-way city street, which lane offers the fastest, least-impeded route?

Answer: none of them. Lanes 1 and 5 are blocked by (illegally) parked cars. Lanes 2 and 4 are blocked by (illegally) double-parked cars. And lane 3 is blocked by the crazy man doing a jig in the crosswalk. San Francisco is a wonderful place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to drive there.

Even so, I do miss the City. I spent a night there last weekend, with some friends who recently finished a zillion-dollar remodel on a Victorian near the panhandle. We walked through the Haight and through Cole Valley to a fancy breakfast cafe on Sunday morning. It was a perfect day in the City, the weather ideal for a hung-over, post-feeding stroll through historic neighborhoods, past strung-out dopers cowering suspiciously in (architecturally fascinating) doorways. We don’t get this kind of color out in the enological farmlands — the only culture we get is viticulture.

More recently I spent a day at two Internet cafes in SF, interviewing candidates for a coveted open position on my web development team. The staffs at these cafes were uniformly cheery, helpful, and uplifting — attitudes belied by the large number of tattoos and piercings in evidence, I thought, not that alternative cosmetics necessarily indicate gang affiliations and evil dispositions. They all seemed really friendly and sincere, much more than I’d be able to manage if I were pulling lattes for minimum wage. But then I was never cut out for that variety of service. Maybe I ought to get a tattoo and a few more piercings.

I think I’ll make an effort to visit the City more often.

One of the worst things about the Internet is that owning a domain name requires that you publish personal contact information in a public directory, where every con artist and scammer in the world can access it. Within a few days of registering a domain name, expect the flood to begin: junk mail and spam, pushing mortgage scams, diet pills, herbal viagra, porn, “easier” web hosting, and a load of other unappealing crap, delivered to every address you’ve provided, whether physical or electronic.

I recommend to everyone that they provide fake physical-address data, because there appears to be no benefit to using a real address. Domain registrars will send an email when the domain is up for renewal; if you’re certain they can email you, or if you watch the expirations yourself, then there really isn’t any reason to give a real address — so long as wrong-thinking legislators don’t make it illegal, anyway.

But, one’s email address is still exposed. Until now: Dotster, my favorite registrar, recently announced a service called Spam Shield.

Here’s how it works:

• Rather than publishing the email address you provide, they publish an address generated for you. Any mail received at this address gets forwarded to your real address…
• after it passes spam filtering.
• And then the addresses are all changed every 10 days, effectively expiring any address that has already been harvested by the spambots.

This is a service I’d pay for, but I don’t have to — at the moment, Dotster offers it for free.