WHO: Radio Shack
WHAT: Sold as new a personal recorder full of the previous owner’s intimate conversations and bank account information. Bonus points for blaming the original customer.
WHERE: Digital Recorder’s Second Owner Learns Too Much About Another Family [ABC]
THE QUOTE: “RadioShack takes seriously its obligation to safeguard the privacy of our customers. In this isolated instance, our records indicate a customer returned a digital recording device and said it did not work. Unknown to us, it actually did work and apparently contained recordings of personal conversations the customer failed to erase from the memory before returning the product.”

“Taking it seriously” is a phrase companies use over and over again in public statements whenever they have bad PR. Our series of posts on occurrences of the phrase is our attempt to question how seriously companies are really taking these matters if every time they trot out this phrase by rote.

(Thanks to Michael!)
(Photo: cmorran123)

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