Game over? Sony FINALLY offers compensation to MEELLIONS of PSN hack victims Millions of PSN gamers, who were hit by a massive data breach on Sony's Playstation network back in 2011, are finally being offered the opportunity to claim compensation from the company. Stateside victims of the hack attack – PSN, Qriocity and Sony Online Entertainment subscribers who held an account before 15 May 2011 – have …
That was Sony's original apology to the masses for the hack (and the resulting month-long downtime). It's also how I got into inFamous, which I'm quite happy about. :-)
This is Sony offering actual financial recompense to people negatively affected. To the best of my knowledge, if my data was taken it wasn't used. By now the card that was in there is long since dead, and I haven't noticed any ill effects. Hopefully their competitors looked at the time that Sony took after the hack to secure their servers and quietly checked their own systems over before similar hacks could arrive.
I just had a look at the claim form and it appears they are offering exactly what I recall them offering in the Welcome Back thing (just less of it). One game from the what appears to be the same list of games OR one from a list of themes OR three months of PS+. You get two bites of the cherry if you did not participate in the Wlecome Back thing.
Seems like an odd thing to have had to go through a class action for - less of the exact same thing non-suing entities (sorry, people) recieved.
Lucky you. They automatically renewed my PS Plus even though I told them not to and billed my card for £39.99 without authorisation. They repeatedly told me it is not their policy to give refunds, they don't accept that I cancelled it even though I had confirmation from them at the time. They have told me that I must be lieing because their system doesn't go wrong and to top it off threatened that if I have the bank reverse the charge then they will ban my account and block access to all previously purchased content.
There is no excuse not to refund an item that a user claims they didn't order which has not be used and incurred no costs. Trying to lock customers into buying something they dont want through small print is a bit of a scummy move, but to still refuse when they have proof that it was incorrect, gambling on the fact that I won't go through the effort of taking it to court is outrageous.
This is not the way an established company should behave and it is certainly not good business sense to take a regular customer and completely destroy all brand loyalty whatsoever.
If the target "metrics" is "New Customers" then of course the "metrics optimiser" does not care one bit about regular customers and brand loyalty. It's like the mobile phone business: The New Deal is always sweat, but, come renewal, they always try to fuck you over with a much shittier one over the phone - so that you wont read the small print first.
Personally, I would skip the reverse charge thing and grass the "PS Plus" up for credit card fraud directly; since they upped the stakes with threats and all.
here's an idea, how about a statutory loss law that gives every person who's information is lost in anyway whatsoever an automatic $1000.
This would save money on lawyers, encourage firms to either keep data better, or not keep data at all.
Companies are greedy by design. They pay nothing that they don't have to.
Make it part of their bottom line, and perhaps they'll take it seriously.
P.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
