PUC apologizes for exposing almost 3,000 customer email addresses

PUC Services Inc. is apologizing to its customers after inadvertently revealing many hundreds of their personal email addresses this morning to other customers.

"It was an accident. We definitely broke our own internal policy," Giordan Zin, communications supervisor, tells SooToday.

At 10:06 a.m., someone in PUC's customer care department failed to click the 'bcc' (blind carbon copy) field on an outgoing email inviting participation in a customer engagement survey about a proposed electricity rate hike.

Some of the email's 2,984 recipients contacted the utility simply to ask why their message began with a very long list of addresses of other PUC customers.

Others were quite angry about the breach, Zin said.

"It was an isolated incident. It's not the way we like to do business."

"We're reaching out to the customers affected and apologizing. We recognize that we let them down. We've taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen again," Zin said.

In a decision in 2004, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada ruled that a corporate loyalty program contravened two provisions of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act when it accidently sent a mass email to 618 participants in a photography contest.

The contest participants, who were also customers of the loyalty program, noticed that all their addresses appeared in the "to" field and were viewable by all other recipients of the message.

The privacy commissioner ruled that the email addresses were personal information that was disclosed without their knowledge and consent, and that the company didn't employ adequate security safeguards to ensure unauthorized disclosure.

Today's mass PUC mailing linked to an online SurveyMonkey questionnaire about PUC's application to the Ontario Energy Board for permission to increase its delivery rate approximately $2.17 a month on a typical 750 kWh residential electrical bill.

Feedback from the online survey will be shared with the Ontario Energy Board, the independent regulator that decides how much PUC can charge its customers.

Respondents get a chance to win $100 off their PUC bill.

To participate in the survey, please click here.