Telstra Publishes Subscriber Data

Our national telco (I guess…) Telstra has always struggled with doing its job. (Kind of like Australia Post is about to try and become the only postal service that doesn’t actually deliver post.) But hey – this is about Telstra. Who have now published full names and addresses of their customers – whether they wanted their details to be published or not…

History

Both of the abovementioned National Shortcomings can be explained easily though: They both arose out of one body. When we arrived in Australia, national communications was all under one Government body: PMG, the department of the PostMaster General. Communications was their wheelhouse, and the PMG managed it as a public service.

Then the inevitable happened and the roles were separated out into separate bodies. Through various contortions they became Australia Post and Telstra, and (of course, given the RW government’s eagerness to turn public services into income) were duly privatised, and almost immediately began to get worse even than government bodies traditionally have been.

Telstra was supposed to roll out a national broadband network that would have made us the envy of the planet, but the wrong infrastructure was chosen to deliver it over. The broadband part (National Broadband Network Company, or NBN Co) had to be carved off from Telstra for various reasons. And what do you get if you carve a business unit off an incompetent unit that had been privatised from an incompetent unit that was born when a semi-competent government department was split? Pretty much exactly what that implies…

So now we have a national telco that sells broadband connections – that NBNCo operates – over Telstra’s existing copper last mile (!!!) phone system – while actual Telstra technicians do the service work on NBNCo customers’ connections.

And – apparently – Telstra publishes their customers’ private details in their White Pages, and keeps a “list of unlisted numbers” for their Support department’s use but apparently without any protocols for how to manage that information.

Privatisation – the very first
step of enshittification
You probably already know
what I’m going to say:
–
– Get Activated! –
&
– Keep The Bastards Honest! –

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