Broken on purpose

Yesterday, Verizon said it will refund up to $90 million dollars to its customers who were charged for accidental data usage.

It happens like this: you own a non-smartphone from Verizon. It can access the mobile web, but you decide you’re not going to buy a data plan because you don’t want to browse the web on your tiny mobile screen. You go about using your phone, but it has a big huge button that launches the mobile browser. When you click that button, it automatically starts loading some kind of “home” screen, using whole kilobytes worth of data in the process. Then you get charged a minimum usage fee for those kilobytes. This shows up on your statement, and you pay it probably without realizing it.

You can’t avoid pressing that web browser button on your non-smartphone because it’s in the same spot as another button that appears on a different screen, and we’re creatures of habit so of course we’re going to press it, or it’s too close to another button, or the buttons are too flat, or the icon looks like something else you did want to click. Oh, and you also can’t reassign the button to mean something else, or disable the web browser entirely.

In my mind, and I think probably everyone else’s as well, Verizon did this to customers on purpose. Through intentionally bad, broken design, they managed to charge their customers an extra $90 million dollars. Only when they were investigated by the FCC did they “discover” the “error” and vow to fix it, explaining that, “Verizon Wireless values our customer relationships and we always want to do the right thing for our customers,” (Mary Coyne, deputy general counsel for Verizon Wireless).

Read more on Huffington Post.