The personal website of Matt Henderson.
22 July 2013
Someone named Dillon Henderson recently joined the Sony Playstation Network using my Gmail address, and I immediately began receiving two to four emails per day, as Dillon recharged his account and purchased content or games, or whatever it is you purchase on the network. (I guess Dillon’s middle name must be “Matt”.)
It was frustrating not to find an “instant unsubscribe” link in these emails, so I figured I was going to have to visit the Sony site, go through the password recovery process (since I own the email address), and then login and delete the account.
But no; the Sony website requires the users’s birthday, in addition to email address, in order to recover the account password.
So it’s off to the Sony website, where I find a Live Chat feature. Of course, I’m in Europe so I have to wait to the following day to access the chat during their US opening hours.
When I finally login to the chat and explain to “Stefanie H” what happened, she quickly expressed how sorry she is at my frustration. Then, she pasted an entire paragraph of text explaining how Sony takes personal data seriously, and is committed to not selling my information to any third parties without my expressed consent.
WTF? I didn’t ask about that, Stefanie.
Oh, Stefanie’s also sorry about this additional frustration.
She then pastes in more text, explaining that I’ve got to send an email to a specific team at Sony that deals with this kind of issue. (And of course, it’s got to be sent from the Gmail account.) She kindly opened a support case with a long reference number that I need to include in the email, and keep track of.
So I’ve emailed Sony, and am now awaiting a reply.
Can you believe this can happen nowadays? Why in the world does Sony not go through a simple email account ownership validation step when new accounts are created?
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