IRS tax records lost on laptops? SOP.
Credit card information obtained by hackers? Been-there, done-that.
Names and addresses of folks who bought or requested free samples of sex lubricant inadvertently posted online and indexed by Google? Priceless.
BioFilm, a privately-held California company specializing in sexual lubricants, exposed customer data files dating from 2003 to 2007 to Google’s search engine in early April. Google then indexed the pages and made local cache copies. A search on an individual’s name now reveals that person’s home address and the product they requested or ordered.
AstroGlide, a once niche product that is now stocked by major drugstore chains and Walgreens, took down its free sample page on Monday (cached copy). The page promised users that “All information will be used for mailing purposes only and will not be distributed to any outside organizations. Except maybe the paramedics if your free trial gets out of hand.”
[…] The files indexed by Google contain a total of 263,822 listings, each of which included a name and mailing addresses. No financial information was exposed. A random sampling included privacy conscious entries such as Current Resident and clearly fake entries for President George W. Bush and former Republican Senator Rick Santorum. Possibly less humorous are the tens of thousands of entries from people who used their real names. These included included doctors, programmers, students and a vice chancellor for a prestigious American university.
The vice-chancellor reached by phone said he wasn’t particularly disturbed by the disclosure. “Obviously I would be disappointed [by the company breaking its privacy policy], but I’m not worried about that information getting out. I think I just gave them my name, address and phone number. I can see how other people would be concerned about it, though.”
Of course, objectively, there’s nothing wrong with ordering or owning something like AstroGlide. Still, in our Puritanical American culture, I’m sure there’s room for some folks to be highly embarrassed — besides, of course, the IT folks at BioFilm, the product’s manufacturer.