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Airline apologizes for male flight attendant harassing a 15-year-old
Australian airline Jetstar has recently apologized to Sunshine Coast-to-Melbourne passenger Elizabeth, who got a little more than she asked for on her flight.Elizabeth's 15-year-old daughter was harassed on Facebook by a male Jetstar flight attendant who met her on the plane, and reportedly got her name from her boarding pass. The 15-year-old, whose 16-year-old sister was also on the flight, received a Facebook friend request from the man, and when she ignored it, she started receiving messages. How's this for creepy? From Switched.com:
"I've never wanted to add a 16-year-old before... um, well you seem quite mature maybe we might come friends. Here is my number....do you even have a phone? What area do you live in?"
According to The Straits Times, Jetstar rep Simon Westaway has said: "We had a very senior manager contact the mother ... We have expressed an apology to her."
FoxNews.com reports that the mother Elizabeth "worried especially during the school holidays that he had made other such requests and impressionable young girls had accepted them."
My thought on this is: even if it were well-over-15-me, I'd have reported this guy for ... I guess an invasion of my privacy? I don't know. There's so little shielding our information from customer service representatives of all types.
Do you think the law should protect our information, or perhaps just our children's information, from the eyes of representatives like flight attendants? And then what do we become ... numbers? How on Earth do we fix a conundrum like this?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bill Callahan Oct 8th 2009 9:07AM
Many people need to see our personal information for their work. I worked in life insurance once and had access to lots of information that we genuinely needed to have in order to issue policies. The key thing is, I never looked beyond the information I needed to do by job, and I never used the information for anything else than for what the information was provided for. Just as doctors and lawyers keep their patients' and clients' information confidential, so should all professionals, including flight attendants.
Joe Oct 8th 2009 12:26PM
All he had was her first and lastname. I don't know how the world would work without even that basic piece of information. While I don't think privacy laws are up to snuff I this is not the invasion of privacy example I would be looking for.
I'll take the story for its face value. A bad egg at an airline harassess passenger, I don't think there is any deeper meaning to it.
decollins Oct 8th 2009 11:11PM
You can't bubblewrap the world.
Incidents like this need to be handled appropriately as they happen, and in this case it sounds like the company has made an appology for the uncontrolable actions of an individual. It sounds like the girl was taught how to deal with inappropriate behaviour and will be ok.
The reaction here should be to teach our children what is and is not appropriate and what to do about it and not leave them to figure it out for themselves.