The latest organisation to suddenly conclude it has the right to send me such unwanted communications is LOVEFiLM which has recently decided it should send me regular SMS messages full of some banal nonsense.

The first such message I received was two weeks ago, on 18th December 2011, and when I then checked my account settings on LOVEFiLM I was surprised to find that all the various “LOVEFiLM Marketing” preferences where unchecked apart from one labelled “by SMS” which I am quite sure I would never have checked, and certainly not while I was refusing much less annoying things like email marketing.

I immediately unchecked the box and then expressed my annoyance on twitter:

Wondering if “please SMS spam me” box on @LOVEFiLM preferences is new as mine is set and I wouldn’t have done that voluntarily…

— Tom Hughes (@thughes) December 18, 2011

Needless to say my tweet was not one that the @LOVEFiLM account chose to respond to…

I assumed however that, having unchecked the box allowing SMS marketing, that would an end to it. It appears that I couldn’t have been more wrong however as today, two weeks later, another spam SMS was received from them. So twitter has one again been deployed:

So @LOVEFiLM can you explain why you are still sending me SMS spam two weeks after I turned off the SMS marketing flag on my account?

— Tom Hughes (@thughes) January 1, 2012

In addition to which I have contacted them directly via their web site to let them know what I think:

Two weeks ago, on Sunday 18th December, I was somewhat surprised to received a marketing text message from you. I was surprised because I had never knowingly agreed to receive such messages and I would normally refuse any such invitation as a matter of routine.

I was even more surprised when I checked my account details on your website and found that all the marketing permission boxes were unchecked except the SMS one. I don’t believe I would ever have chosen those settings, so I wonder if you added that option and defaulted it to on without requesting my permission?

In any case I unchecked that box on Sunday 18th December.

Perhaps you can therefore explain why, two weeks later, I have just received another unwanted spam SMS from you in defiance of my clearly stated preferences, and hence illegally, being in breach of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003.

PLEASE CEASE AND DESIST WITH THIS BEHAVIOUR IMMEDIATELY.

For the avoidance of all doubt please take this message as notice pursuant to regulation 22 of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 that you are not to send me unsolicited SMS messages again.

Any repeat will be reported to the Information Commissioner’s office for possible enforcement action with no further notice to yourselves.

Now I will sit back and see if I have managed to get their attention this time and if they are willing to learn that this sort of behaviour is completely unacceptable.

Today I got the final statement which, because of the refund of the fee for the second year, showed a credit balance. Rather than enclosing a cheque for the balance though, or indicating that they had repaid it to the account that I had been using to pay the card bills, the statement had this curious message:

What I want to know is, how many people exactly don’t want a refund, and would instead prefer to hand their credit balance over to American Express?!?

Of course their secure messaging system insists on me selecting a card before I can send a message, and won’t let me select a cancelled card, so sending them a message to ask for my refund turned into a bit of a palaver as well…

Lloyds TSB had some Important Information to share with me...

I wonder how many million of those they’ve just sent out…

String-based interpolation of association conditions is deprecated. Please use a proc instead. So, for example, has_many :older_friends, :conditions => ‘age > #{age}’ should be changed to has_many :older_friends, :conditions => proc { “age > #{age}” }.

Now call me confused if you like, but isn’t the suggested replacement still doing just as much string interpolation as the original?

Somehow I don't think that's what they meant to say...

I wonder how many of those they’ve just sent out…

The situation is that a year ago I changed my package and the new package includes a discount of £2.99 a month if you agree to be bound by a rolling one year contract. To date everything has been fine and they have deducted the discount from each quarterly bill.

In April they wrote to say that the first year was nearly up and that if I didn’t contact them they would assume I wanted to continue for a further year.  I was happy to continue so did nothing.

I was slightly surprised therefore when the latest bill showed no discount beyond 21st May when the first year ended. So I contacted them to ask what going on, and this is what I was told in response.

I can confirm that the reason the discount has not been applied to your recent bill is because BT wanted to make sure that you where happy to keep the service, therefore this will all be rectified on your next bill in August 19th 2010 and on this bill you will be able to see the adjustments, which will cover the billing period for the 20th May 2010 also.

So basically they are saying that they’re going to take bill me the full price now then refund me on the next bill – essentially they want to borrow £8.97 from me for the next three months so they can earn the interest on it instead of me.

The bit about wanting to make sure I was happy to continue is, of course, complete nonsense. As soon as I allowed it roll over into the second year I was contractually bound to continue with it for that year and I’m sure they would have been very quick to bill me for the rest of the year if I had tried to cancel.

I guess maybe I should consider what interest rate I should apply to my loan to them…

Possibly not the impression BT would want to give

Yes, that’s right, the first discussion listed is titled “Am I really Unlucky or is BT Customer Services really this abysmal?”. From my experience I’d say the answer is yes, it really is that abysmal…

The Isle of Dogs from The London Cycling Guide

By way of comparison, here’s how the same area looks in OpenStreetMap at the moment:

The Isle of Dogs from OpenStreetMap

Obviously the maps in the book have had extra information added, and some things like stations changed a little, but the base map is clearly both OpenStreetMap data and OpenStreetMap cartography.

Naturally enough the first thing I did was to turn to the acknowledgements to see what nice things they would have to say about the project, and indeed we do get a mention, though more in passing than anything. What it says is:

All other maps by Steve Dew using base maps by Openstreetmap

More alarming however was what I found at the front of the book, among all the other copyright statements, where it has the following line:

Copyright © 2010 in maps New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd

Whilst it is probably true that there is some copyright (in the additional work done on top of the base map) which vests with them, there is also clearly a substantial amount of work whose copyright lies with members of the OpenStreetMap project.

As far as I can tell nowhere does it indicate that the maps carry a CC-BY-SA license, which they must do, by virtue of being derived from OpenStreetMap maps which carry that license.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that people are using our work (and my own work even – some of the area shown above was surveyed by me) in this way – that’s the whole point after all. I just wish they would spend five minutes to properly credit us and to point people at the license, both of which the license actually requires them to do.

For the record, the first map in this post is © OpenStreetMap and contributors and New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd and the second is © OpenStreetMap and contributors. Both are licensed under CC-BY-SA.

]]> http://compton.nu/2010/05/how-not-to-credit-openstreetmap/feed/ 6 http://compton.nu/2010/04/closed-with-my-agreemen/ http://compton.nu/2010/04/closed-with-my-agreemen/#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:54:25 +0000 Tom http://compton.nu/?p=313 I think the following quotes from my email exchange with BT speaks for itself. First my email to BT last Thursday:

Whilst this clearly addresses the question of how the second call came to be made after I had been placed on the opt out list, and I am quite happy to accept that explanation, it appears to say nothing about how the first (or indeed the second) call came to be made when my number was registered with the Telephone Preference Service.

Equally it says nothing about why the Complaints Management team were failing to manage my complaint by not replying to my earlier letters.

and in reply from BT I get this:

Following your email, I am now pleased to confirm your complaint has been closed as fully resolved with your agreement.

Strangely enough I don’t remember agreeing to any such thing. I guess I was wrong when I said I was getting somewhere with them…

I few weeks later I got a letter from BT Complaints Managment saying that my complaint had been passed on to them and they had been unable to find any record of the call to me (hint – try looking in the logs of all those Indian subcontractors you hired) but that I had been added to their suppression list so should not receive any more calls.

Well today they went for the win by calling me again – this time to try and sell me Broadband. This time round I have a recording of the call so it will be interesting to see if they try and deny it again.

What’s more as their previous letter acknowledges that they are aware of my wish not to be called they are now in violation of regulation 21(1)(a) of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 as well as regulation 21(1)(b) which they breached last time.

A second complaint has been filed with the TPS and a letter will be winging it’s way to BT later on…