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How can children learn faster what brings an ambulance to an emergency sooner how do you get the right man in the right job the answer is computers only computers can cope with a diversity of the municipal demands and to help you understand some of the uses of computers we bring you the series computers and modern city government your host for these programs is deputy city administrator Dr Summers from the office of the mayor today's program will deal with computer frauds here now is Dr Service computers have been called the greatest invention of the twentieth century and in other programs in the series we have seen ways that computers are being used to improve the life of the citizens of New York but along with the beneficial uses of computers we are also beginning to see some harmful uses of computers in short some unscrupulous operators are using computers in various ways to defraud the public our guest today is assistant attorney general Sandy Mindell of the New York state attorney general Lefkowitz office and the subjects we'll be talking about today are some of these frauds and in particular who are going to talk about the computerized dating services that many people in the street have become familiar with one way or another and also about some not quite so some rather shady operations in computer schools and schools for computer programmers. Sandy let's talk about the question of computer dating. What to describe what computer dating service is and how many of them are there how many computerized dating services are there in the New York area Steve we don't really have an exact number but there are probably range close to about one hundred operating in and about the metropolitan area basically a computer dating services a service which allegedly provides the names of four or five members of the opposite sex to a person who subscribes to the service usually for a fee of somewhere between three and ten dollars and it's kind of a it's kind of a mechanical matchmaking service so well replacing mothers and mothers in law is more mechanical more than mechanical I would say it's build the scientifical latest thing going you know and it's all supposed to be done on a scientific basis through the use of these modern computer methods and it's more or less intended to eliminate the old you know hit and miss type matching because it's supposed to be really calculated to bring two people together who really match OK let's describe how it works I remember walking down the street some place the other in some person usually an attractive young girl is handing out flyers leaflets and questionnaires asking me if I want to a subscribe or enter the computerized dating service. What happens exactly how does this how does this work what is a questionnaire like for example well we have seen questionnaires that are over one hundred question questions in length and they range over all kinds of subject matter some of them very intimate for example I picked one up in front of me that came to the attention of our office and one of the questions requires the applicant to give his views on sex. Well attitude says circle one a very liberal the liberal C. moderate tending toward liberal the moderate tending toward conservative a conservative and so on is another one that's a little far out which says which of the following have you used a grass be the acid the S T P E E yoga. Speed goofballs opium etc so you can see that these can get pretty wild but basically the kind of information that they require is name the age of the applicant. Religion political preferences. Their attitude toward alcohol and toward smoking their educational background general questions like What the what happens with you suppose someone fills out the questionnaire and sends it in principle what's supposed to happen next well it's our understanding that they're supposed to be programmed and fed into a computer and and there are puter finds an ideal mate based on how you answer the question I tried and then you get four or five or six names of. Individuals who you are allegedly are ideally matched and suited to and you're supposed to carry the ball call them I'll call it a day and then take them out. I'm not much of a psychologist I understand that some of the services which at least try to do. To send you some names at some of the services do try to use psychologists to work to prepare the tests but it seems to me as a layman not as a psychologist that the art of trying to figure out when two people are going to be attracted to each other is still very much a hit and miss proposition computers for all their much vaunted power and ability are nevertheless can really have much of an impact on this what comments do you have and I Well Steve the question that I've raised with these companies when I've met with them and I really never have had a satisfactory response. Is that most of these schools and there are most of these services and there does appear to be. Rather fierce competition between them only have a limited number of people who subscribe to the service and therefore regardless of the fact that the question there may be very lengthy as I say in some cases over one hundred questions may well have been prepared by a professional psychologist how many of these questions actually go into the. Computer in terms of matching In other words if you have a very small base to begin with doesn't it boil down to the fact that you really cannot can match on such questions of whether you're a man or a woman and whether or not your in your twenty's or in your forty's and you know real basic stuff I suppose if a guy feels out a questionnaire. And he subscribes to a service and it turns out of the entire service there are only a total of ten girls who are registered in that service and all these questions about literary interests or attitudes about sex and age and religious and political affiliation really turn out to be irrelevant as you say I be lucky to get five names of girls let alone girls who for within any of these category are for example we had a complaint recently where somebody wrote in and answered the application in terms of the fact that he was looking for girls in the age group of between eighteen and twenty one and he got back a list of girls who are in their forty's and. I suppose that the particular computer service just didn't have girls within that age group to satisfy isn't it one of the what is the most common kind of complaint that you get from from from people in your role as assistant attorney general from the Bureau of consumer fraud protection what one of Prince. The kind of complaints you get about the computer dating services Well I guess the most common type of complaint is that people pay their service fee just don't get any services. But they get no response they send them the question the dollar and they don't get a bill the list that I tried or the list is much more when they do get the names and names are completely out of whack with what they requested and. One fellow recently wrote. He asked for a list of girls and he was matched with a number of men so. Whether this was a slip up or not I don't know. But. They can reach very serious proportions we are very concerned Steve as to what happens to these lists after the men in other words assuming the company goes out of business and we have had many examples of companies actually going out of business because in many instances these companies are run with a shoestring budget. As you can realize if somebody answers a length the application and puts down a lot of information which is very intimate and. Very Personal where concerned as to what happens to these lists if they get into the wrong hands you can get into a very serious situation running all the way up to a possible blackmail situation that's interesting that you're quite right considering our concern in general with matters like invasion of privacy and subjects of that sort I can easily imagine all sorts of problems occurring if the lists do fall into the wrong hands for one reason or another in fact I think remember something that your office of covered over a year ago what the going have to do with precisely that issue was scribed you know we had a very serious matter arise and actually we really can't blame the computer services directly but what had happened was that an individual gentleman out. In the metropolitan area had subscribed to a number of lists and as a result of his subscription he did get a number of girls and he took the names of these girls and he published his own list and title something like hot dates in the city of New York and he sold these lists. Various stories around the Times Square area and lo and behold these girls who had absolutely no knowledge that they were now on a list of hot dates in the city of New York began to get the most fantastic telephone calls and we investigated the matter when we received a few complaints from these girls and we obtained an injunction in joining this individual from publishing these lists but as I say today we hear so much about the desire to be protected in our privacy rights yet. We find that so many people are willing to give the most intimate of information without knowing really who. They're dealing with and what's going to happen to these lists so. Our advice certainly when you're dealing with these companies is to try and find out exactly who is running and try and. Be very cautious in the answers that you're giving I mean it's one thing if you treat these things lightly and I guess in a broad sense they're intended to be treated Whitely and as a pleasant way of meeting someone. But it's another thing take these so serious that you spill your whole life history out including your sexual attitudes your political and your religious preferences and things like that the because this can be. Quite serious and as you may know Steve there is are no license in requirements at present for people in gauging in this field or indeed in the largest spectrum of the field of matchmaking you know they're there matchmaking is has long been a popular field and it still goes on even without the use of computers but these people don't have to be licensed in summary they're on this question of computer dating services I suppose that as in most businesses that there are the myth that the majority of the people running the computer David dating services are honest and sincere and do provide a service and attempt to provide names in response but I suppose that the user of the service ultimately was most worried about the things that you mentioned one divulging very personal information about himself which if it fell into the wrong hands could be embarrassing or worse to him secondly he has to weigh in his own mind how scientific can you possibly be on trying to find a mate or date after all but if one does treated lightly as as a as he was still just one more way of trying to meet somebody and if it's worth that kind of money and that and that effort to you I suppose a properly warn consumers about what you can expect no question let me turn from that to. The other subject the question of computer schools there is but there's a great and well known shortage of computer experts and computer programmers in the country and in the city the New York City area is kind of the capital of computers as a matter of fact there are more computers located in New York City than any other place in the world except perhaps a manufacturing plant a lot and I don't think that that's true. So New York City being a well known kind of city for corporate headquarters locations does have many many computers and has a great need for computer experts computer systems analysts computer programmers and keypunch operators. And to fill this need a lot of things have been happening one of the colleges and the junior colleges have extensive courses and programs in this area and many of the large computer firms have started schools to train people and to teach people in computer programming and keep punch operations and then in addition a lot of the private schools have been established not affiliated with any of the major organizations many of them good a few of them as expected operating on the fringe of of ethical and proper behavior what are some of the experiences that you've had that have been called to your attention in this area Sandeep I'd like to say Steve that this is one of the major areas I believe of complaint we are presently receiving from the consuming public in our office of bureau consumer fraud and protection. Some of the complaints generally are we've had a rash of these recently that the schools just go out of business and. Students are stuck in the middle of their course with no facilities made by the schools to have their education completed and in many cases people have already paid the entire tuitions the so they're really stuck what kind of tuition fees are charged by these schools what kind of range of you have your encountered well are they vary but I guess they can go as high as close to two thousand dollars I would like to say that. One problem I guess you can call it a problem in the state is that the way our education was presently written a computer school does not have to be licensed Now there is a provision for voluntary registration ninety schools have chosen to take that path and to voluntarily register with the Department of Education I'm not saying that any school who is not registered is not an ethical school because that certainly is not the case I am sure the. Many schools that give the consumer a proper education who have chosen not to. Register themselves under this voluntary registration but I certainly. Think that. This is an area for remedial legislation it may very well be that the state should require computer schools to be licensed in view of the fact that there is such an explosion of these schools and such are apparently a legitimate need for them because of the industry demand OK so one of the major problems that you identify is schools which take the money from a from a student and then wind up going out of business and and not giving him his money's worth going out going out of his of closing down what are some of the other kinds of complaints that you've gotten from the about the school well for example we concerned with some of the advertising climbs that we read and hear on television and radio. Very often they are is in our opinion a misleading reference to the fact that the school is connected with I.B.M. one in fact Of course I.B.M. has no connection to them also we have advertising claims that the students can earn a certain sum of money usually a very high sum of money upon graduation from the particular schools and for example just recently I had a telephone call from a an owner of an employment agency who said that he had a tremendous backlog of graduates from these schools who were unable to obtain positions at the high salary levels that had been promised them both through the advertising and the representations of the faculty in the school on that subject I remember seeing ads which indicate that. A high school graduate can start at a salary of ten thousand dollars per year now as a matter of fact in my knowledge of the of the employment rates for high school graduates who have gone to computer schools an hour and who have acquired some experience. In computer programming I'd be surprised if if a person starting out with just that kind of modest knowledge can start more than a six or at the at the most seven thousand dollars per year and sat in an ads which indicate that you can come straight out of one of the schools and start a ten thousand dollars per year are indeed misleading they simply don't reflect the reality of the world and that is a misleading promise. And on the other point you mentioned about the the use of the words I.B.M. International Business Machines is is the major a name in the computer field of course. But they could be public or to know that there is not a single school which is entitled to use the name I.B.M. There is no school that is authorized to use the name I.B.M. in its in its advertising or to describe itself as an I.B.M. school. Another complaint we get Steve for example in the advertising is that the. There is an allusion to the fact that student loans will be granted now in my mind and perhaps in your as a student loan in the long that is granted usually by a bank at a very low rate of interest. And it turns out that what the schools mean by this student loans is that they can arrange financing through a financing of a finance company or through a bank at normal rate or venture So generally speaking I think that the connotation of a student loans can be rather misleading if the student feels that he's getting an extremely low rate of interest it's another way of getting into the into the loan business in other words on the part of those well I I'm not suggesting that the finance companies are charging interest over and above what they are legally entitled charged but I am suggesting that generally speaking in some of the cases that we have seen the student is not getting a loan at any lower rate with the ability for example some programs permit a student to pay off alone after a certain number of years after he's completed school for example but this generally is not the case in the their O.C. I think now another complaint we've gotten is that the equipment the computer equipment which. Was promised just isn't on the premises and furthermore we find that some of the complaints state that the. A faculty. Member. Teaching a particular course is not up to par in the student's mind and the student doesn't feel he's getting the training that he contract it for and I guess another problem is that some of the computer schools may or may use obsolete equipment and if a programmer learns to program in an obsolete programming language on an obsolete computer he's not really terribly prepared for anything but becoming a trainee if you get a job as a programmer. Well in one particular case not only was the equipment obsolete but it was nonexistent we just are in the process of investigating such a case where they were promised a computer and a computer just didn't materialise How about the guarantees given by some of these schools that upon graduation there the graduate will get a job as a programmer Well here again. Because of the. Tremendous interest in consumer protection many schools shy away from giving I inquired written guarantees but there is no doubt that students have complained to us that implications were made that upon graduation they would go into a very high paying job. It seems to me that an area that the student should focus on is the question of refunds for example if for any reason the student is displeased with the course or for one reason or another has to voluntarily withdraw this is something the student ought to find out about before he signs up because. The refund policies were vary from school from school to school and in some cases they may be more liberal than others and if a student has any idea of having to withdraw your to make sure that he can get a school that has the. Type of refund policy that he is interested in how about aptitude tests these are a device that or used by by these computer programming schools in order to see whether an applicant is in fact. Does have the basic aptitude qualifications and or to become a programmer is there any hanky panky associated with those aptitude to well Steve as you know being in the computer field. The question is not that the aptitude test is being given but what is going to be done with the aptitude test after it is given in other words how critically is it mocked. Is it disregarded completely or is the student given a liberal leeway. So far we haven't really been able to turn up any direct evidence along those lines but we have had people that have come to our office just from a. View in speaking to them don't seem to be at all qualified in this field and yet they've told us that they have taken aptitude tests of course it's a question of what you do with the separation Yeah I suppose if I want to become a fly by night operator here I'd. Give an aptitude test in the Be careful to throw it away and simply accept the student and give him a rave letter telling about how up how up how well he did on the aptitude test and by all means he should come in and roll in my school but again we do want to make the point as you did earlier Steve that the overwhelming number of the schools in the city as attorney general Lefkowitz says. Are legitimate and are interested in providing the consumer with the proper training it's only a fringe element that we have trouble and we have seen that in the computer area as in other areas that can the consumer must be aware and must be alert whether he's subscribing to a computer dating service or whether he's a considering taking a course at one of the computer programming schools we'd I'd like to thank our guest today who has been missing has been Mr Sandy Mindell from the state attorney general's office the assistant attorney general in the Bureau of Consumer Fraud the protections thank you very much Sandy thank you thank you Dr Service you have been listening to another broadcast of computers in modern city government if you have any questions about today's program or would like a free booklet entitled introducing the computer address them to computers W N Y C New York City one hundred zero seven and join us again next week at this time for another look at computers in modern city government.