by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Sometimes I worry that a lethal combination of bad and very bad people will figure out where I live. Then they’ll come to my home with guns, sharp sticks and unfriendly intentions. I’ll lay out the bear trap and spill boiling olive oil on them.

But there’s no need to worry about these things, because the people holding my personal information would never be tricked or bribed into handing out my info to bikers named Pierre “No-name” Laframboise and René “Fuck-Up” Tremblay. Baddies could never figure out where I live across from Oxford Park. Although police officers and license bureau employees have been jailed for divvying out info, there might well be a problem with our phone company workers.

According to the federal privacy czar, little would stop a Bell Canada employee from accessing the files of potential targets and peddling them to assassins, or so reads a scathing new indictment of the company’s privacy practices by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, George Radwanski.

Bell’s woes with the privacy czar began when disgruntled former employee Sylvain Gagné blew the whistle on the phone giant last year. The commish sent an investigator to pick through the bones and one year later, the results came through in the mail.

The privacy people, being very private people, wouldn’t confirm the news. But Gagné and Bell have acknowledged that Bell has been slammed for a series of cock-ups. 1—They recorded customers’ phone calls without warning. 2—They gave workers scrap paper to use made from files with all sorts of personal data of customers. 3—Bell allows workers to listen in from home on conversations they had with customers throughout the day via a system called Technotron. The workers can re-listen to chats they had with phone clients about their credit card numbers, social insurance numbers and other digital-age booty.

Bell rep France Poulin suggests that the corporate cubicle monkeys won’t be swapping my info in exchange of a handful of biker-made crystal meth. “Employees are aware of the code and are trained in safeguarding customer information,” she says. “Employees have responsibilities and they’re very clear that they must abide by the company policy.” Having been a one-time Bell employee who broke a lot of company rules (including the less-than-seven-minutes-in-the-bathroom rule), this explanation didn’t do much to reassure me.

Sylvain Gagné, meanwhile, is thrilled. Gagné was fired from Bell for—he says—making an issue of the mishandling of personal data and opposing the unrelenting pressure put on agents to sell. The St-Henri born-and-raised father of three has since become a one-man wrecking force opposing Bell Canada. Gagné’s a semi-regular Bell basher on weekend nights on CKAC and frequently visits bingo halls to discuss phone issues with seniors. He also gets swamped with e-mails via his site, www.infotelcanada.com, where he advises consumers of better long distance deals than what’s offered by Bell. Last week Gagné even tried to videotape a contingent of Bell employees leaving on a flight to Paris in order to prove that brass hogs the prize seats that are meant to be awarded to sales staff. Security took his camera away.

Bell and Gagné are squaring off in front of an arbitrator over the issue of his firing. He says he’s already turned down a six-figure offer to drop his grievances and plans to shake down the brass at the January shareholder meeting.

>>

In another example of disheartening corporate conduct, the Montreal Gazette has announced that for the first time, it’s keeping some of the money raised by the Gazette Christmas Fund. Unlike in the past 34 years when the entire contents of the fund were distributed to the poor, the Winnipeg-based CanWest Global company will be retaining eight per cent of the total this year. Assuming they raise a million bucks again, that means they’ll be keeping $80,000 of it this year. Publisher Larry Smith tells me, “We’re not taking any money from it. We have to hire people to run this fund, all we’re trying to do is to cover the costs of the outside folks.” :

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca