Thanks to sloppy work at BC Hydro, you can obtain the billing status of any residential customer, including the amount owed, the amount of the last bill, when it was paid and when the next bill will be due, by simply entering a phone number. Whether that violation of privacy is the work of Accenture or not is not as relevant as the fact that no one appears to have checked their information system for protection of privacy before putting it into operation thus exposing personal information of hundreds of thousands of people.

Phone the BC Hydro help line at 1-800-224-9376 and work through the menu until you get to residential account status. The automated system apparently uses caller ID to confirm your phone number, but it goes further by providing an option to say that is not the correct number and to replace it with any valid phone number. Once a "corrected" number is entered, the system reads the account information for the address where that phone number is located.

BC Hydro should disable that option immediately, and the Campbell government should apologize for a major crown corporation that put contracting out ahead of protecting your privacy. Just think what could happen when the Campbell government completes the contracting out of your medical records!