Invasion of privacy
Ever since I subscribed to etisalat’s Double Play 10MB package, etisalat’s salespeople have been harassing me with calls for special offers. I’ve never had a good experience with them.
I recently made the mistake of accepting a free offer from one of their many salespeople and let him upgrade my internet from 10MB to 12MB for “free”.
The customer service agent offered to give me a free router and cordless phone, despite my telling him that I didn’t need it, but he insisted I could continue to use mine and keep the new router aside.
When the technician arrived, he changed my router to their D-Link Managed Services Router, and since that time I have had many issues and none of their customer service representatives can resolve it.
They said they had to use Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and I could not use my existing router with it. This is an invasion of privacy since I never gave permission to etisalat to remotely connect to my router and reset or change my configuration and settings.
A few days ago, I lost internet connectivity and after speaking to three different engineers, nothing was fixed, but the internet started working anyway.
The next morning, an engineer from the technical department called to ask if it was fixed and I said yes, and then he enabled two wireless interfaces on the D-Link router with my real name as the SSID and my mobile number as the password — which is extremely insecure — without my permission.
I tried to disable these two interfaces, since I was already connected to the wireless interfaces of my Linksys router, which is connected to their D-Link router as an Access Point.
I called up 101 again for this matter and their engineer wasn’t able to disable the interfaces. I feel their invasion of privacy should be escalated to higher authorities. Their incompetence is affecting my health and I cannot continue to lose my temper over this issue.
From Mr Osama Rashid
Sharjah
The management of etisalat responds:
Thank you for bringing Mr Rashid’s concerns to our attention. Kindly note that our customer service team has contacted the customer and addressed the connectivity issue. Mr Rashid is now accessing the network through his router. We would like to inform you that this matter has been resolved.
(Process initiation: March 7. Response from organisation: March 16. Process completion: March 16)
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