I started getting strange messages from the Hilton Honors (HHonors frequent sleeper) program this evening. The first message was in German, sent at 9:18pm. Then a message in Spanish at 9:27. English followed at 10:25 and now French came in time stamped 10:27, right after the kind lady at HHonors Customer Help Desk said ‘don’t worry, we have the situation under control and it is now fixed.’

I called HHonors the first time right after the German message, but they transfered me to a line with no voice mail and I thought ‘oh well, no big deal.’ When the next language came through, I figured it was time to try to get it fixed.

While I have been on hold in the Hilton call centre, I traced the origins of the email messages. They appear to be legitimate, but errant. It appears that Hilton contracted out this campaign to Epsilon Interactive who pride themselves at being able to send out 5M emails per hour. That means that they could have easily sent these messages to the entire HHonors database – at least 4 times.

It seems to me that improved email practices can be learned from this incident. Obviously, this is an accident. But one of the problems I faced in trying to notify Hilton about a problem is that no one at their call centre is even aware of the campaign, there is no phone number in the message, there is no escalation process.

I wonder if any of the people in charge of email campaigns make a point of being included in every mailing – just so that they can see problems as they are happening. Clearly, that isn’t the practice at Hilton.

As a result, the easiest recourse for their Gold level members (the target of this campaign) is to filter out all email from HHonors, or unsubscribe completely. That is the last thing that Hilton wanted from this campaign.

I like to think of myself as being somewhat technically literate. I can program VCRs and can figure out most software without a manual.

I have a confession. I don’t like the menu systems I have used so far for digital TV. I think the set top box industry is trying to force a computer application into a TV remote form factor and it just isn’t working for me. My wife? Ha!

Scrolling through hundreds of channels? No thanks.

And when I want to search for a program, there has to be an easier way than selecting characters awkwardly with the arrow keys. Why isn’t it predictive? The system knows the names of all the shows – when I enter W, the search subsystem should offer a menu of shows that begin with ‘W’.

If I find difficult, then what about all the non-geeks out there who still haven’t changed the clocks in their cars to Daylight Savings time?

IP-TV service providers take note. As Apple proved with the iTunes/iPod combo, there are great returns for a company that provides an easy user interface.

I was reading about the massive payout to former Exxon chief Lee Raymond and I couldn’t help but wonder why the telecom sector is so much against being turned into a group of commodity providers. After all, the oil sector seems to have made out OK churning out barrels of oil that look an awful lot like the barrels churned out by their competitors.

Sure, they have a little bit of differentiation – I only buy Petrocan gas in the winter because they have succeeded in convincing me that Petrocan’s blend of Winter Gas is best for my old beast.

I think most shareholders would be thrilled to have oil industry returns on their telecom stocks.

Tyco is paying $50M in civil penalties to the SEC for its previous management’s cooking of the books. Nortel settled a shareholder class action suit for $2.5B in February. What do these events have in common?

In both cases, shareholders are paying the price for management misdeeds. Notice that there aren’t payments from the Board of Directors. These aren’t payments from the management teams that misbehaved. The audit firms haven’t refunded their fees.

Instead, in some warped sense of justice, shareholders are paying fines and settlements for the transgressions against themselves. Perhaps it is supposed to be a form of penance; self-flagellation to achieve a higher level of forgiveness in order to move forward.

Sorry – I don’t feel cleansed. I’d like to see the Boards and the auditors held accountable. If the Board fell asleep at the wheel, despite their tens of thousands of dollars in retainers and meeting fees, then hold them accountable for these fines and settlements. Individual shareholders rely on and pay handsomely to have auditors and the Board look after their interests.

Yet individual shareholders have again paid for the failure of both groups to do their jobs.

Andy Abramson writes about a concern that the EU has imposed new data retention rules that could have an immense impact on VoIP service providers. He suggests “Toss in a little port blocking, some packet shaping, add some IP address tracking and you have 1984 in 2006.”

I’m not sure that is fair. His concluding statement, “More importantly it shows that governments, telcos and likely the investment communities are all very interlaced” certainly doesn’t follow – at least not in my logical thought process.

What is the fuss about? The European Union is requiring that service providers retain “data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication”. In the case of conventional or mobile telephony, that means having the calling number, name and address of the caller and called party and relevant cell sites or location information as well as equipment information such as the IMSI and IMEI. For email and internet telephony, IP address information will need to be retained.

Interestingly, “No data revealing the content of the communication may be retained pursuant to this Directive.” In other words, the EU directive does not ask to have the messages themselves retained, only the header type information. It is looking at the outside of the envelop only. Note that the clause says “pursuant to this Directive.” Presumably, another Directive, or an order by one of the National Regulatory Agencies, could require the retention of the content.

The latest EU directive is pretty clear in limiting how such data can be accessed:

In other words, it looks a lot like providing law enforcement officials with access to the same information they would have in a paper environment. Looking at the outside of the envelop. As I have suggested in other posts, the EU is removing a digital loophole in its application of law.

After 15 years of anarchistic rule (or lack thereof) in the internet world, isn’t it time for a little law and order?