Ticketek Exposes Customer Emails
Ticketek Exposes Customer Emails
August 13, 2008: Ticket agent Ticketek is in a spot of bother after an employee exposed tens of thousands of customer email addresses in the body of an email sent out advertising an upcoming show.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, over 110 pages of customer emails were sent out in the body of an email advertising a pre-sale of tickets to see The Dandy Warhols. Ticketek has blamed human error on the blunder, which has seen tens of thousands of addresses, or 0.01 percent of the database according to Ticketek, exposed.
The breach has been serious enough for The Australian Privacy Commission to launch an investigation, however, under current Australian law there is no punishment for companies that breach privacy regulations.
“This kind of thing is ludicrous - that such errors could be permitted to occur and not have controls in place to prevent them occurring,” said Roger Clarke, chair of the Australian Privacy Foundation to the SMH. “While we don't want to go off the deep end about a single error the fact is corporations aren't being careful enough with consumer data and are not being held to account.”
As IDM reported yesterday, the introduction of mandatory data breach notification in Australia has been foreshadowed in a recent report into Australia's Privacy Act. The Australian Law Reform Commission’s three volume report recommends 295 changes to privacy laws and practices in Australia.
Ticketek says it is currently contacting all affected customers with an apology.
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