Menzoid: Petro Canada and being arrested update!
You may not recollect, but back in February 2011, The Menzoid did a video blog documenting his latest saga he had experienced, at the time, involving a Petro-Canada service station and handcuffs!
Before carrying on reading, should you need a reminder of the story, please click here for the video link.
The latest update? Here it is, written by himself for the Toronto Sun earlier this month. The moral of the story? Always keep your private information, well…..private!
David Menzies:
In the aftermath of this humiliating incident, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada investigated and released a report.
For starters, Suncor Energy Product Partnership (which owns Petro-Canada) notes that contrary to the clerk’s claims, it is not company policy to record driver’s licence information when a credit card purchase exceeds $100.
And with good reason: Doing so would violate the Personal Information and Electronic Documents Act.
To make this clear, Petro-Canada has issued a nationwide memo to all employees noting: “Please ensure you are not recording any Guests’ personal information, i.e., Driver’s License #, Passport #, Citizenship #, etc. Under no circumstance should you write down the Guests’ personal information on any document including the Guests’ receipt. Exception: Licence plate #s may be recorded for providing only to the police in the event of a drive off.”
Retailers can request to see your driver’s licence to confirm your identity. But they have no right to record your 15-digit licence number.
Why was this particular Petro-Canada doing so? According to the station’s owner, driver’s licences were being recorded to “protect customers.” Yet he was unable to explain how customers would be protected by surrendering this information.
More worrisome, he refused to say what he planned to do with the data already collected from other customers. (Petro-Canada spokeswoman Pat Vallejo later told me the station owner was ordered to destroy this data. I assume he complied.)
Bottom line: Don’t allow your driver’s licence to be recorded by a retailer. If a clerk is adamant about obtaining such data, perhaps you should call the cops.
