Eric was most likely an early adopter of Gmail, meaning that he was able to nab the address “elastname@gmail.com.” If you substitute in Eric’s actual last name for “lastname”, that is. The problem, as many early Gmail adopters can tell you, is that every other “E. Lastname” in the world seems to give out Eric’s e-mail address as his own. This time, it was serious: an AT&T business account holder gave the company Eric’s e-mail address, and now he’s getting notifications that have way, way more personal information than he’s comfortable having about a stranger. AT&T’s response? He should contact their customer himself.

An AT&T business account holder incorrectly entered my email address on their account. Since then, I’ve been receiving email notifications with this person’s phone number, billing info, account number, and more, which is a serious breach in privacy for this person.

I contacted the live chat support for this account (since the notification emails are “do not reply”) to have a support rep help their customer correct their account. However, the support rep said there was nothing they could do, that I should not receive emails too often, and to try calling their business customer myself to get it fixed.

Not only do I have no way of unsubscribing to these emails, which I’ve already received several of today, AT&T does not care at all about their customer’s privacy.

Does this sound familiar? It should: we posted a nearly identical situation with Virgin Mobile a while ago. In this case, Eric should try making more calls around AT&T, but the problem is that this really shouldn’t be his problem.

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