Bear Stearns may be violating your privacy
Bear.net and Bear Stearns
This website has no relationship with The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc. (hereafter appropriately referred to as "BS")Unfortunately for the employees and customers of BS, BS has not taken proper steps to properly educate their employees as the the intelectual property rights of Bear Networks - the original, and only owners of the bear.net domain. As a result, many of BS's customers and employees send email to this domain.
This causes increased load on our servers and resources. As a result, we are forced to shoulder the costs of the increased bandwidth with no revenues to offset these costs. We believe, based on conversations with some employees of BS that this harassment is intentional. We believe BS is attempting to harass us into giving them the domain. At no point, and under no circumstances will this domain ever be given to BS.
Through the years we have received spreadsheets containing employee names, addresses and social security numbers, loan packages (from their EMC Mortgage division), buy/sell orders, airplane reservations, credit card statements, seminar registrations and much more.
As out attempts to resolve this in a reasonable manner have failed (it is difficult to resolve anything when one party refuses to talk to you), we have no choice but to start publishing some of this data in hopes the people who's privacy has been violated by BS will notice and take action. To be clear, we will not release anything with SSN numbers or other information that would allow someone to steal their idendtity. Just enough to let them know that this is in fact happening and that they need to take action since Bear Stearns refuses to.
We have in the past contacted the various media and consumer organizations to no avail. Either they do not care about your privacy or the folks at BS have convinced them to not publicize this breach of customer trust.
- Andrew Sullivan - Time Magazine Columnist
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Financial Times
- MarketWatch website
- Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
- Dallas Observer (owned by Village Voice Media)
- Bill O'Reilly (after all, he claims to be "looking out for you."
