It's always disturbing to find a vendor playing a little too fast and loose with confidential information about its customers. One reader recently had such an experience with DirecTV, but with some odd twists, as it was not his own personal info but another customer's that was being bandied about. And DirecTV declared it could not inform the wronged customer of the error ... supposedly to protect that customer's privacy.

"I've recently changed my primary e-mail address and since I've had DirecTV.com send their auto billing information via e-mail, I dutifully logged into their site and updated my profile to reflect the new address," a reader we'll call Mr. Smith wrote. "Everything went smoothly, or so I thought, until the next month's billing came out and my old e-mail address was used again. I double-checked my account information at their site and could find no instance of my old e-mail address. I then used the online contact form to complain that my old e-mail address was still being used. I received a reply within a day or so stating that my information would be updated, but with no specification as to where DirecTV was hiding this."

The reader thought the story would end there, but that wasn't the case. A few days later he received another e-mail from DirecTV thanking him for "Your Recent Call to DirecTV" and encouraging him to register his account online. There were a few problems with that from the reader's point of view, one being that he hadn't called DirecTV and another that he already had his account registered online. But the worst part was that the message was not addressed to him but to a Mr. Jones, and it included a DirecTV account number that was presumably Mr. Jones' account as well, because it wasn't Mr. Smith's.

"Oh, great. This time I did resort to calling DirecTV directly to notify them of this new problem. Long story, short -- the rep stated that she could double-check my account. She did so and said that now she was changing the address there to reference my new e-mail address. I then asked about getting my e-mail address off of Mr. Jones' account. 'Oh, I'm sorry, I cannot do that. I cannot access his account without his permission.' I asked why giving his account information to me was OK in their eyes since it was their mistake, but correcting their mistake was a problem? I was told that I would be 'transferred to their internet people' whereupon the call was disconnected."

This leaves Mr. Smith in something of a moral quandary. His own account seems to have been straightened out, but Mr. Jones is unaware that his private information has been assigned to someone else's e-mail address. And DirecTV seems indifferent to Mr. Smith's attempts to draw attention to the situation. "At this point, I'm not sure what to do," he writes. "I could probably register Mr. Jones's account and alter it enough that DirecTV would be forced to correct their error. The joke here in my office is that I should order a few HD DVR units and all of the sports packages for the year to really get someone's attention. But I'm not that kind of person. But I have no way of contacting Mr. Jones, and he has no way of knowing what DirecTV has done with his account. Oh, well."

What, if anything, should Mr. Smith do? Since he has no intention of taking advantage of the situation, perhaps no harm will come of it if he does nothing. But what if DirecTV starts sending Mr. Jones important notices about his account via the defunct e-mail address? Or what if the original mistake is due to endemic problems with DirecTV's system that bad folks are already exploiting? Let us know your thoughts -- post your comments below or write me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.