Bell Drops Plan to Sell Phone Customer Lists

Bowing to complaints, Pacific Bell dropped its plan Tuesday to sell lists of its residential telephone customers and their addresses to direct-marketing firms.

“One of the reasons we proposed list-rental service was because we felt it would benefit the consumer in the long run,” said Jerry Abercrombie, director of information resource products for the phone company. “However, some customers have expressed concerns, and we don’t want to proceed until it’s clear that the benefits to the consumer outweigh the concerns.”

The company will go ahead with its plan to sell listings of its commercial customers, however, he added.

The California Public Utilities Commission was scheduled today to suspend permission to sell the listings, which it had approved--without public hearings--in February. The PUC was to consider whether to conduct its own investigation into the Pacific Bell proposal.

PUC spokesman Carole Kretzer said the commission has received no complaints from business customers. On the other hand, Kretzer said, complaints from residential customers were running at about 50 a day.

Leading opposition to the sale of customer names was TURN (Toward Utility Rate Normalization), a San Francisco-based coalition of consumer groups. TURN’s executive director, Sylvia Siegel, called the program “an egregious invasion of privacy,” and predicted that once customers’ names and addresses were allowed to be sold, additional, “more confidential” information would soon be peddled.

Pacific Bell had sought to safeguard the privacy of its 7.2 million residential customers by allowing them to opt out of the program by mailing in a card to request exclusion. About 5% of its customers were expected to choose to have their names excluded from rented lists, but only about 1% had exercised that right by Tuesday, Abercrombie said.

Pacific expected the program to generate about $7 million a year in new revenue--an amount Siegel and other opponents called insignificant compared to the possible intrusion on customers’ privacy.

Other former Ma Bell companies have already begun marketing their listings. Mountain Bell began renting listings of its 5 million residential customers in August, followed a few months later by Illinois Bell, which has 2.5 million residential customers.