href="http://www.listclassaction.com/">Web site of the TransUnion privacy litigation class action. According to TransUnion, settlement administrators will have more details for class members no later than June 16.
Reprinted with permission from Computerworld. Story copyright 2008 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved.
Comments
Call me skeptical but the first thing I thought was ... what a great way for TransUnion to make money out of this settlement ... they are going to give people 6-9 months of credit monitoring ... and then turn on the advertising screws for conversion to paying clients ... so the $75 million is actually a pittance ... and they are getting free promotion through the news media. (Remember, it doesn't matter if its good or bad as long as your name is in the news!) Minimal advertising costs and a "virtual" investment of $60-90 per "individual" (actually family) that signs up for the free credit monitoring service. A virtual investment because for the vast majority of people who sign up for these monitoring systems the sponsoring companies have to do virtually nothing. Anyone in Direct Marketing would think they died and went to heaven on this deal. Looks like the clients were not as well represented as they thought and the 150-160 million other Americans who will learn about this by "word of mouth" by news services ... or by email ... hyped up by family and friends ... have no idea that they have been very nicely targeted for long-term marketing by TransUnion ... now this is a CLASSIC example of the very best minds in a marketing department working with the corporate attorneys to hood-wink the plaintiffs, the court, the media, etc into thinking there is some form of punishment going on here ... Question ... what is the annual marketing budget of TransUnion? And how many BILLIONS is TransUnion worth ... PLEASE someone who is intelligent in investigative reporting ... keep an eye on this story and let us know over the next 24-36 months what kind of conversion ROI TransUnion got on this sweetheart settlement! Finally, why in the world is TransUnion collecting the last four digits of the SSN on these folks at this point in time ... when I first saw the sign-up site ... I was a bit "concerned" at this mining for personal information ... one would think that would come later with a legitimate request on letterhead. But then again, if my thoughts about the marketing ploy are correct ... this is what I would have expected from TransUnion. My hat is off to them and their attorneys for turning a sow's ear into a purse made of woven PLATINUM threads.
KG
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