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Ad Blocker Ghostery Celebrates GDPR Day by Revealing Hundreds of User Email Addresses

posted by chromas on Sunday May 27 2018, @06:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the derp dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

Ad-blocking tool Ghostery suffered from a pretty impressive, self-inflicted screwup Friday when the privacy-minded company accidentally CCed hundreds of its users in an email, revealing their addresses to all recipients.

Fittingly, the inadvertent data exposure came in the form of an email updating Ghostery users about the company's data collection policies. The ad blocker was sending out the message to affirm its commitment to user privacy as the European Union's digital privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), goes into effect.

The email arrived in inboxes with the subject line "Happy GDPR Day — We've got you covered!" In the body of the email, the company informed users, "We at Ghostery hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to users' privacy, and have implemented measures to reinforce security and ensure compliance with all aspects of this new legislation."

Source: https://gizmodo.com/ad-blocker-ghostery-celebrates-gdpr-day-by-revealing-hu-1826338313

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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Sunday May 27 2018, @07:26PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 27 2018, @07:26PM (#684886) Journal

    the privacy-minded company accidentally CCed hundreds of its users in an email

    It's an easy mistake to make.

    That sounds reasonable.

    Unless.... Let's step back and get a little perspective.

    Ghostery Celebrates GDPR Day by Revealing Hundreds of User Email Addresses

    the privacy-minded company accidentally CCed hundreds of its users in an email

    with the subject line "Happy GDPR Day — We've got you covered!"

    the company informed users, "We at Ghostery hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to users' privacy, and have implemented measures to reinforce security and ensure compliance with all aspects of this new legislation."

    It's an easy mistake to make.

    I respectfully disagree; that actually sounds like it's one of the less easy mistakes one might make.

    I am actually kind of curious what mitigation steps ghostery plans to take to remove the likelihood of this happening again.

    If violating your privacy is a pretty easy no-biggie mistake for your privacy software vendor, you probably have the wrong vendor looking after your privacy.

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