T-Mobile Sidekick owner files a Class Action Lawsuit against T-Mobile and Microsoft for loss of data from her phone.
Maureen Thompson from Atlanta, till recently, was the proud owner of T-Mobile Sidekick. She had bought this phone after being convinced by the grand claims made by T-Mobile about the security and protection of their user’s information. A common reason why people used sidekick was because the Sidekick ads spoke about “data always being secure and available”.
Sidekick user’s data is stored on Microsoft powered server called “Danger”. On Friday, October 2, 2009, this server went down only to return three days later. All Sidekick customers received a message from Microsoft after three days after the server had gone down. This message casually warned users not to remove or “hard-reset” their devices, doing so would cause their data to vanish. Alas, it was too late.
Thompson filed suit alleging that “Defendants negligently failed to invest the resources, including hardware, software, procedures, maintenance, security, back up procedures, and the training and testing necessary to insure that the functions and operations Defendants assumed would operate to permit Plaintiff and the members of the Class to access and keep safe and secure that data they entrusted to Defendants.”
To cover up their mistakes, T-Mobile offered the “victims” $100 gift cards and free service for one month! However, T-Mobile’s attempt at putting a dollar value to user’s data ended up being insufficient to pacify the outraged customers.
In my opinion, corporate giants like Microsoft and T-Mobile have created technology for the masses, technology that people depend on in their everyday lives. These creations have indeed made them rich and powerful. However, no matter how large a corporation, it is important to value the information of your user. It is also important to live up to the claims that you make.
Sources:
http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/10/15/classaction-lawsuit-filed-microsoft-t-mobile/
http://www.intomobile.com/2009/10/15/t-mobile-gets-class-action-sued-over-sidekick-snafu.html
{ 2 } Comments
An information professional might tell us that user need, user information, user-friendly, and user-centered is purpose of the business in our age which is information age. How important the user information is.
Data Loss is the most serious issue in all software/service development phases. To avoid such disaster, different teams should have different approaches and plan ahead:
a) dev and test team: technically ensure it will never happen
b) management team: detailed plan for both dev/test and marketing teams to make sure all cases are handled
c) marketing team: disaster recovery plan must be plotted BEFORE the product/service is pushed into the market