Charter Watcher

Confirmed: Charter is listening

Mediapost has an article this morning that showed up in Google Finance about Charter’s delay in selling our personal information to NebuAD. It seems like concerns over privacy may be partly to blame, but a quote from a Charter rep is the most telling part of this story.

From the article:

A Charter spokesperson attributed the delay to technology issues. “It will happen when we’re technologically ready,” the spokesperson told Online Media Daily.

This doesn’t surprise me either. As I’ve talked about before, Charter doesn’t have the slightest clue how this is going to work. Charter customers will tell you how bad their network is in general, with outages being far too common and complete hackery on the part of techs and admins being par for the course. Let’s not forget the thousands of email accounts which had all of their data erased back in January. This is what makes Charter’s wiretapping program so terrible. These people can hardly keep their own subscribers online and functional, and yet they want to dedicate their resources to something which, if done poorly, will have vast privacy implications to more than three million Americans. And you can bet your bottom dollar that if Charter does this, it will in fact be done poorly.

If you’re a Charter stockholder you might want to start getting concerned now too. Not only will this program likely lead to a pretty significant drop in subscribers, it will eventually give way to some horribly huge lawsuits. Imagine how many zeros are going to be in the checks paid out to people who have reporters knock on their doors based on information being captured by Charter. It happened to AOL with their “anonymous” customer information, and there’s a 100% chance that Charter will leak private data at some point through this program. Meanwhile Charter is just barely rebounding from having been delisted from Nasdaq, and when this program blows up in their face I’m sure their stock will once again crumble.

It’s good to see that Google Finance is picking up on the story, and I expect to see more financial publications taking it on as details unfold. Anytime a company is making decisions which severely threaten the financial well being of not only the company, but that of every customer which the company serves, it’s a safe bet that the market folks will take an interest.