Religious Discrimination by AT&T?

[hvn_nbr_2]

My local phone service was with Pacific Bell, which got gobbled up by SBC, which has now in turn been gobbled up by AT&T. I had an online account with SBC to pay my bill online. About a week ago, I got an email from AT&T/MySBC that I had to change my user ID because it doesn't meet their new guidelines.

The rules are basic stuff like only letters, numbers, and certain special characters, no words like "administrator," no profanity.

My user ID was witchdoctorxxx.

So I went to the page to change the ID, and there they also said they have a list of words that are not allowed, but they don't tell you the list of words.

For an experiment, I tried changing my ID to christiandoctorxxx. No problem. All I changed was "witch" to "christian." So I used their "contact us" email page to tell them that their new guidelines appear to be a clear case of religious discrimination.

Here is their completely non-responsive "response" (with some highlighting added by me). As you can see, every word except my name is a cut-and-paste, and it gives no indication of even having read my comments, much less responded in any way to what I said:

Dear Mr. xxxxx,

Thank you for your recent email. We appreciate you taking the time to
share your feedback.

The AT&T family of companies respects our customers' privacy. We are
constantly improving our applications to provide the highest level of
service and security. As a result of our efforts, accessing your AT&T
Account Manager (formerly MySBC) requires a change of your User ID.

Though this may be a temporary inconvenience and we respect your rights
to choose your User ID, there are certain formatting parameters that
have to be followed to provide each customer with an even higher level of
security. We are certain you will appreciate the efforts we have taken
to protect your information.

Please take a moment to view the guidelines for updating your User ID
below:
- Spaces are not allowed in the UUID
- Use of words that appear on our prohibited words list are not
allowed. Examples are (not an all inclusive list): administrator, info,
wording containing com, dsl, www, and Company names (ATT, SBC, MCI, MSN,
Verizon, etc.)
- Any use of profanity is strictly prohibited.
- User ID must be between 6 and 18 characters in length
- User ID can be comprised of any combination of letters, numbers, and
the following specific characters (all other characters are
prohibited): period (.), hyphen (-), and underscore (_)

snip irrelevant boilerplate

If this response does not address your concern, please reply directly
to this email. To ensure a timely response, do not change the subject
line of your reply.

snip more irrelevant boilerplate
Regards,

xxxxxx
Your AT&T Customer Service Representative

NOTICE
Based on the information you provided, our understanding of your
request, and currently available data, we have addressed your inquiry to the
best of our ability. If we have not answered your question, reply
directly to this email, and we will respond as quickly as possible during
regular business hours. Please note that prices, terms, and conditions
are subject to change, and in the event of a discrepancy, prices, terms
and conditions in any applicable tariffs govern.
snip more irrelevant boilerplate

Here is my response to that:

You say that you have addressed my inquiry to the best of your ability. In fact, you have not addressed my inquiry in any manner whatsoever. Your entire response is a canned and standardized cut-and-paste that makes absolutely no mention of the issue I raised.

Since you didn't get it the first time, I'll repeat it:

I claim that you are discriminating based on religion because the user ID witchdoctorxxx is unacceptable but the user ID christiandoctorxxx is acceptable. The only difference between the two user IDs is substituting the word "christian" for the word "witch."

All of your cut-and-paste about the number of characters and which characters are allowed obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with this case. From your list of criteria, the only possible conclusions about the reason for disallowing my previous ID are either that you consider the word "witch" profanity or the word "witch" (but not the word christian) are on your list of disallowed words.

I kept this matter private between you and myself until now because I expected that you would do the right thing and correct the discriminatory policy. But now that your "response" has been completely unresponsive to my concern, I will feel free to go public to persons and organizations which are concerned with religious freedom.


I have not yet received any response to that.

[politicaholic]

1. AT&T is a mindless, souless entity, I doubt there's an agenda there...

Its a situation of, "Do what you're told or go to the competitor, eventually we'll own them too, so good luck."

I have fortunately abandoned using the service of all monopolies. Ticketmaster was the hardest.

[petronius]

2. Seems pretty clear-cut to me

The only other explanation I can think of is that it came from their no profanity rule - whoever was making the list added 'bitch', then stuck in 'witch' because it rhymes and is often used as a surrogate. I think that more people think of 'witch' as a sexist insult than as a religious term.

Overall, I'd say that they are wrong, but your chances of getting satisfaction are pretty low - you'll beat your head against a wall for a long time before AT&T admits you have a point...

[Ian David]

3. Maybe because "witchdoctor" and "witch" may be used as insults

and contrary to what we hear from Frist and DeLay and Dobson, it is not (yet) an insult to be called a Christian.

But we should work on that. :)

[H3Dakota]

4. Except...

The ID in this case is for an online account used to pay the bill, view statements... it isn't like it is a login for a message board or anything! The only person seeing the login is the person logging into the account. Unless I am misunderstanding something?