Sex Lube Maker Finds Personal Info Quite Slippery

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the can't-get-a-grip dept

As personal data leaks go, this one’s more potentially embarrassing than harmful, but the maker of the sexual lubricant Astroglide leaked the name and addresses of more than 250,000 people who asked for free samples over a four-year timespan. They’ve even got the gall to blame the issue on Google, since it was searches there that turned up the breach, and the search engine’s cached copies haven’t yet disappeared. Of course, this ignores the fact that the information was kept in a place where it was freely accessible, whether by Google’s spiders, or by an individual. This leak really isn’t particularly surprising given the regularity with which all kinds of personal info is leaked, lost or stolen these days. It just further illustrates that any information you provide to somebody can no longer be regarded as private. So little care is taken with personal information by so many companies these days, and these continual leaks bring only minor consequences. If companies can’t even bother to keep something as innocuous as a name and address private, it’s hard to have much faith they won’t let other, more important information slide right on out too.