Skip to main content

RadioShack wants to sell customer data to the highest bidder, and many people are very upset

radioshack may sell customer data
Sergey Yechikov/Shutterstock
Even though the fate of customers’ data wasn’t revealed when RadioShack filed for bankruptcy last month, most thought the retailer wouldn’t sell that info to the highest bidder. RadioShack had even promised not to do so, but recently, KSL reported that the retailer plans to sell off customers’ sensitive information.

Part of the company’s bankruptcy process now involves the sale of the information of 117 million customers. This information includes names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and even customers’ purchase history. Unsurprisingly, this has aroused the ire of more than a few attorneys general of several states, including RadioShack’s home state of Texas. These attorneys general have filed objections against the auction, arguing RadioShack violated its promise to not sell its mailing list.

Recommended Videos

In his motion, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that, even in the form of a bankruptcy auction, RadioShack’s attempted sale of customer data is a “false, misleading, and deceptive business practice.” The motion references a promise made by the retailer in its privacy policy, which was posted on its website.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“At RadioShack, we respect your privacy. We do not sell our mailing list,” the policy reportedly read.

According to Bloomberg, AT&T is also fighting RadioShack’s quest to sell off customer data. The carrier claims that it owns the data — not RadioShack — because it helped the retailer sell phones with detailed AT&T customer information lists and other key info. AT&T argues that the data could be used by a competitor to hurt AT&T’s business.

RadioShack did not issue a comment on the matter, and it’s unclear whether the retailer will follow through with the auction. The rest of the retailers’ plans are slightly more transparent.

When RadioShack announced it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Sprint announced it would move into 1,750 locations to allow RadioShack to live as a store-within-a-store. In other words, Sprint would be the main brand on storefronts, with the RadioShack brand still visible within the stores.

Amazon is rumored to have a similar deal with RadioShack, though there hasn’t been any confirmation from either company on that front.

Williams Pelegrin
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Williams is an avid New York Yankees fan, speaks Spanish, resides in Colorado, and has an affinity for Frosted Flakes. Send…
Turns out, it’s not that hard to do what OpenAI does for less
OpenAI's new typeface OpenAI Sans

Even as OpenAI continues clinging to its assertion that the only path to AGI lies through massive financial and energy expenditures, independent researchers are leveraging open-source technologies to match the performance of its most powerful models -- and do so at a fraction of the price.

Last Friday, a unified team from Stanford University and the University of Washington announced that they had trained a math and coding-focused large language model that performs as well as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek's R1 reasoning models. It cost just $50 in cloud compute credits to build. The team reportedly used an off-the-shelf base model, then distilled Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model into it. The process of distilling AIs involves pulling the relevant information to complete a specific task from a larger AI model and transferring it to a smaller one.

Read more
New MediaTek Chromebook benchmark surfaces with impressive speed
Asus Chromebook CX14

Many SoCs are being prepared for upcoming 2025 devices, and a recent benchmark suggests that a MediaTek chipset could make Chromebooks as fast as they have ever been this year.

Referencing the GeekBench benchmark, ChromeUnboxed discovered the latest scores of the MediaTek MT8196 chip, which has been reported on for some time now. With the chip being housed on the motherboard codenamed ‘Navi,’ the benchmark shows the chip excelling in single-core and multi-core benchmarks, as well as in GPU, NPU, and some other tests run.

Read more
Chrome incognito just got even more private with this change
The Chrome browser on the Nothing Phone 2a.

Google Chrome's Incognito mode and InPrivate just became even more private, as they no longer save copied text and media to the clipboard, according to Windows Latest. The changes apply to Windows 11 and 10 users and were rolled out in 2024. However, neither Microsoft nor Google documented it.

Even though this change is not a recent feature, it's odd that neither tech giant thought it was worth mentioning. Previously, the default setting was that when a user saved text or images to the clipboard history, it was synced with Cloud Clipboard on Windows. Moreover, accessing this synced content was as simple as pressing the Windows and V keys, which poses a security risk, especially when using incognito mode.

Read more