The Haggler: Tracking a Child Support Mix-Up In New York

There are surveys that cover just about every aspect of air travel: rates of on-time departures, rankings of frequent-flier programs, and on and on. But the Haggler has never seen a study that shows which airlines regard fliers as the biggest idiots.

Huge omission, right? And until a thorough inquiry is undertaken, the Haggler contends that US Airways takes the dimmest view of its customers’ intelligence. On what evidence is that conclusion based? When you call the airline’s reservation number, the first utterance you hear after you shimmy up the phone tree and await a representative is this:

“Note that under federal law, passengers are prohibited from bringing hazardous materials on the aircraft.”

Is there a sentient human on this planet who is unaware that bringing hazmat on a jet is verboten? Is it not self-evident that loading up your baggage with potentially lethal, flammable and/or toxic chemicals is uncool, not to mention illegal?

The most charitable explanation here is that US Airways is just trying to kill some time by filling your ears with factoids, as you stew on hold. But being called a dummy, by implication, doesn’t make the stewing more pleasant. Quite the opposite. Why not just remind us to wear clothing to the airport? Or to walk upright?

The Haggler posed these questions to US Airways, mostly because he can. A spokesman, John McDonald, wrote back and noted that a lot of passengers have no idea how many everyday items are considered hazmat by the Federal Aviation Administration. He listed some: spare curling-iron gas cartridges, dry ice in an airtight container, a can of aerosol spray starch, loaded firearms.

The loaded firearms — not really a surprise. But the others are.

“Our friendly little reminder on the start of the call,” Mr. McDonald wrote, “is just to pique interest, as it did with you, to ask the question: What is hazmat?”

Respectfully, as an interest piquer, the “little reminder” stinks. So here’s some free advice: Bag the little reminder and give callers a list of the surprising items that are banned. Or list eight items that might be hazmat and challenge callers to pick out the one that isn’t.

“Great idea,” wrote Mr. McDonald, effectively neutralizing the Haggler with cheap praise. “I’ll pass it along to our reservations team.”

Problem all but solved.

Question: Is there any way to improve the world that is too trivial for the Haggler?

Apparently not!

Enough of this folderol. It’s question time.

Q. I am a single mother, and my case does not involve bad corporate customer service but rather the seemingly impenetrable New York City Office of Child Support Enforcement that has for months now miscalculated the child support arrears owed by my daughter’s father.

An order was issued by family court on Nov. 30, 2012, specifying that the support collection unit of the O.C.S.E. was to assess the father’s arrears at $12,568 plus the previously calculated arrears, which were $7,439. Instead of adding the new arrears to the old, as instructed by the court order, the O.C.S.E. substituted the new arrears of $12,568 for the previously calculated arrears of $7,439. An amended order was issued on Jan. 8, 2013, in an attempt to be clearer for the O.C.S.E.’s employees.

The amended order came only after I spent five hours speaking with eight different people in two different buildings.

But the new order didn’t help. Yet again, the O.C.S.E. simply substituted the new arrears of $12,568 for the previously calculated arrears of $7,439.

I have spent the past four months doing everything within my power to rectify this situation, and I have failed. If I were to seek legal counsel to help me, I’d be spending thousands of dollars to try to get a state bureaucracy to do its job enforcing a court order. The $7,439 that I am trying to get would be spent in legal fees.

If you would consider trying to intervene on my behalf, I would be more grateful than you could know.

L.G.

New York

A. The Haggler has spent little time dealing with the public sector, so he sent an e-mail to Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate. Mr. de Blasio, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for mayor, runs an office that mediates between the electorate and the city government. He handed off this matter to a staff member, Phil Walzak, who brought in the office’s director of constituent services, America Canas.

The pair went at this for several weeks. On April 23, Mr. Walzak wrote to say, “Still gathering the details on this case, but my constituent services person says the case outcome is actually positive.”

The Haggler spoke to Mr. Walzak and Ms. Canas a few days later, and they were low on details about what exactly went wrong at the Human Resources Administration, home of the O.C.S.E.

“Why it got screwed up at the front end, we don’t know,” Mr. Walzak said.

“A little bit of a missed communication,” Ms. Canas speculated, “and a lot of emotion.”

The leaders at the Human Resources Administration did not offer much more illumination. A spokeswoman, Carmen Boon, initially suggested that this entire matter was fed to the Haggler by the public advocate’s office, presumably to make that office seem like heroes. (Untrue.) Then she e-mailed a statement.

“This is a very rare instance in which an unconventional court order lacking proper terminology and not identifying a specific dollar amount to add back to the arrears balance caused confusion among our staff,” Ms. Boon wrote. “Once the issues with the order were detected, H.R.A. worked as quickly as possible to update the amounts owed and fix this unfortunate situation.”

It would nice to file this entire affair under the category of “learning experience.” But nobody here seems to have learned anything. Other than the Haggler, who learned that he much prefers dealing with the private sector, where blame-pinning is invariably far easier.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Slipstream: Legislation Would Regulate Tracking of Cellphone Users

THERE are three things that matter in consumer data collection: location, location, location.

E-ZPasses clock the routes we drive. Metro passes register the subway stations we enter. A.T.M.’s record where and when we get cash. Not to mention the credit and debit card transactions that map our trajectories in comprehensive detail — the stores, restaurants and gas stations we frequent; the hotels and health clubs we patronize.

Each of these represents a kind of knowing trade, a conscious consumer submission to surveillance for the sake of convenience.

But now legislators, regulators, advocacy groups and marketers are squaring off over newer technology: smartphones and mobile apps that can continuously record and share people’s precise movements. At issue is whether consumers are unwittingly acquiescing to pervasive tracking just for the sake of having mobile amenities like calendar, game or weather apps.

For Senator Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, the potential hazard is that by compiling location patterns over time, companies could create an intimate portrait of a person’s familial and professional associations, political and religious beliefs, even health status. To give consumers some say in the surveillance, Mr. Franken has been working on a locational privacy protection bill that would require entities like app developers to obtain explicit one-time consent from users before recording the locations of their mobile devices. It would prohibit stalking apps — programs that allow one person to track another person’s whereabouts surreptitiously.

The bill, approved last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would also require mobile services to disclose the names of the advertising networks or other third parties with which they share consumers’ locations.

“Someone who has this information doesn’t just know where you live,” Mr. Franken said during the Judiciary Committee meeting. “They know the roads you take to work, where you drop your kids off at school, the church you attend and the doctors that you visit.”

Yet many marketers say they need to know consumers’ precise locations so they can show relevant mobile ads or coupons at the very moment a person is in or near a store. Informing such users about each and every ad network or analytics company that tracks their locations could hinder that hyperlocal marketing, they say, because it could require a new consent notice to appear every time someone opened an app.

“Consumers would revolt if this was the case, and applications could be rendered useless,” said Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, who promulgated industry arguments during the committee meeting. “Worse yet, free applications that rely on advertising could be pushed by the consent requirement to become fee-based.”

Mr. Franken’s bill may seem intended simply to protect consumer privacy. But the underlying issue is the future of consumer data property rights — the question of who actually owns the information generated by a person who uses a digital device and whether using that property without explicit authorization constitutes trespassing.

In common law, a property intrusion is known as “trespass to chattels.” The Supreme Court invoked the legal concept last January in United States v. Jones, in which it ruled that the government had violated the Fourth Amendment — which protects people against unreasonable search and seizure — by placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car for 28 days without getting a warrant.

Some advocacy groups view location tracking by mobile apps and ad networks as a parallel, warrantless commercial intrusion. To these groups, Mr. Franken’s bill suggests that consumers may eventually gain some rights over their own digital footprints.

“People don’t think about how they broadcast their locations all the time when they carry their phones. The law is just starting to catch up and think about how to treat this,” says Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group based in San Francisco. “In an ideal world, users would be able to share the information they want and not share the information they don’t want and have more control over how it is used.”

Even some marketers agree.

One is Scout Advertising, a location-based mobile ad service that promises to help advertisers pinpoint the whereabouts of potential customers within 100 meters. The service, previously known as ThinkNear and recently acquired by Telenav, a personalized navigation service, works by determining a person’s location; figuring out whether that place is a home or a store, a health club or a sports stadium; analyzing weather and other local conditions; and then showing a mobile ad tailored to the situation.

Eli Portnoy, general manager of Scout Advertising, calls the technique “situational targeting.” He says Crunch, the fitness center chain, used the service to show mobile ads to people within three miles of a Crunch gym on rainy mornings. The ad said: “Seven-day pass. Run on a treadmill, not in the rain.”

When a person clicks on one of these ads, Mr. Portnoy says, a browser-based map pops up with turn-by-turn directions to the nearest location. Through GPS tracking, Scout Advertising can tell when someone starts driving and whether that person arrives at the site.

Despite the tracking, Mr. Portnoy describes his company’s mobile ads as protective of privacy because the service works only with sites or apps that obtain consent to use people’s locations. Scout Advertising, he adds, does not compile data on individuals’ whereabouts over time.

Still, he says, if Congress were to enact Mr. Franken’s location privacy bill as written, it “would be a little challenging” for the industry to carry out, because of the number and variety of companies involved in mobile marketing.

“We are in favor of more privacy,” Mr. Portnoy says, “but it has to be done within the nuances of how mobile advertising works so it can scale.”

A SPOKESMAN for Mr. Franken said the senator planned to reintroduce the bill in the new Congress. It is one of several continuing government efforts to develop some baseline consumer data rights.

“New technology may provide increased convenience or security at the expense of privacy and many people may find the trade-off worthwhile,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote last year in his opinion in the Jones case. “On the other hand,” he added, “concern about new intrusions on privacy may spur the enactment of legislation to protect against these intrusions.”

E-mail: slipstream@nytimes.com.