GTE’s Recall of Directories

Your April 20 editorial (“What Price Privacy?”) that questions GTE’s handling of the recall of some limited-distribution Street Address Directories does not present a complete picture.

There was never any question that we would inform our customers whose numbers were inadvertently published. The difficult decision we faced was the timing of the communication. We made what we believed was a decision that would best serve the interest of our affected customers--to quickly and effectively retrieve the directories before making the situation a matter of public knowledge. We believed this carefully developed course of action would greatly increase our chances of successfully obtaining virtually all of the directories in question. Before initiating our retrieval efforts, we advised the California Public Utilities Commission of our plans, and we have appreciated its input to, and support of, our approach.

We believed that the only way to ensure a quick and thorough collection of the directories was to replace them with new directories. For that effort to be successful, two things had to happen. We had to implement steps to ensure that safeguards were in place to prevent future directories from including nonpublished, nonlisted and address-omit information. We had to print new, corrected directories to replace the old versions. These two steps took us weeks of comprehensive efforts to complete.

There’s an old saying that “hindsight is 20/20.” Certainly, The Times or anyone else is entitled to look back upon this situation and disagree with our actions, their timing or their sequence. But no one can disagree with our intent. Our decisions were made in the best interests of our customers. We want the public to know about our efforts and to know that we are not only sorry for our mistake, but that we have tried our best to respond responsibly and in the best interests of our customers.

DAVID R. BOWMAN

Regional President

GTE, California

Thousand Oaks