Dear Editor,

It is a dangerous world out there for you and your credit card, with people having the ability to scan your credit cards and passwords without even touching you, and illegal card scanners placed on ATM machines gleaning all your personal credit information, never mind the hazards of giving your credit information over the phone or internet to some crook.

You can protect yourself to one degree or another, but still I have been seriously compromised once, and caught a couple of mistaken charges on my card over the years.

But up until now, if someone had of told me I couldn’t trust the government enough to give them my credit card information, I would have said they were undeservedly paranoid.

Not anymore.

The other day I registered online at TReO for my decal for the new Port Mann bridge, gave a credit card number to pay any tolls I might rack up, and thought that would be the end of that.

Monday I got a phone call from a friend who had signed up online also, and his credit card company phoned him saying his credit card had been compromised by TReO. He was told that 271 people who had registered by phone using their credit cards had their cards compromised, and both the RCMP and the Transportation Privacy Commissioner are investigating.

Just to be safe, I cancelled the credit card I had used to register.

I find it particularly disturbing that you can no longer even trust the government with your credit card information, possibly the end result of having a government that does not believe in government and is doing everything in its power to get rid of government employees – the BC Liberal privatize-at-any-cost agenda.

TReO is a private company doing government business, whose employees no doubt make little better than minimum wages, which would make for a lot of disgruntled workers, and obviously makes for poor performance similar to other privatized government functions such as hospital cleaning and other such dismal failures.

It’s time to get a government that actually believes in government, and actually endeavours to make government agents and agencies both efficient and cost effective – and does not just screw up government functions so it can justify privatizing them.

Wayne Clark, Maple Ridge