Elance: Questionable Customer Service
After yesterday’s trouble with Elance workroom updates being sent to the wrong people, I received a final email (at 2:30 this morning).
Here’s the text, minus the graphics and footer stuff, but otherwise unchanged:
Dear SpikeTheLobster,
As you no doubt already know, in the past 24 hours we inadvertently sent you as many as 73 copies of the “Daily Summary” email notifications from Workrooms that are not associated with your Elance account.
This is an embarrassing mistake. Please accept my personal apology for the inconvenience, confusion and disruption these emails may have caused you.
We hope that if you haven’t already, that you will promptly discard these emails so as to preserve the integrity of the communications that have been mistakenly sent to you.
Thank you for your ongoing support of Elance, for your understanding and for your cooperation.
Respectfully yours,
Maurizio Gianola
VP, Engineering
Is it just me or has anyone else noticed the distinct lack of understanding on the part of Elance regarding the potential impact of this error?
This is not “an embarrassing mistake” – it’s an extremely incompetent breach of client trust and security. I may have received up to 73 emails that I should not have seen – seventy-three private messages. Just imagine what could have been in those emails and what damage I could do with that information.
Complete descriptions of products, confidential innovations for website design, discussions of bank account details or phone numbers… anything could have been in them.
The announcement email has “We respect your right to privacy” in the standard footer. Perhaps, but not enough. I have, of course, replied and invited them to drop in and comment.
The one good thing is that the VP of Engineering is apparently a geek: anyone who’s more concerned with the “inconvenience, confusion and disruption” extra emails cause, rather than the legal and financial implications for the company as a whole is definitely a tech-head and gets my vote. Yay, Elance.
Hi Spike,
I also realize some mistake in elance. when i was trying to send message to my client inside PMB. I sent message and with 1 mint i got mail that xyz person sent you message. then i try to read mail and i see it’s same message which i sent to my client.
One of my friends also got 23 message mail from other project.
Elance People have to think about Security.
Alpesh
i can do this phone verification but stil it is incorrect.when they call to me and i asked the code they say it is incorrect..so what can i do……….