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Sexuality Blog

By Cory Silverberg, About.com Guide to Sexuality since 2005

Customer Information Leaked from Popular Lubricant Website

Tuesday April 24, 2007

An accident on the website of BioFilm, the company that manufactures the popular Astroglide personal lubricant, has resulted in customer information making its way into Google search results and cached pages. The story was first reported on website Homeland Stupidity. From the article:

Astroglide suffered a data breach this week. People who ordered the company’s products from their Web site from 2003 to the present may have had their names and email and shipping addresses published on the Internet.

The breach exposed information for as many as tens of thousands of Astroglide customers. The data was broken down by product and date and much of it is still available in Google’s cache. It’s not known at this time how long the information, which consisted primarily of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and CSV formatted text files, was published online.

According to an update, the company has now taken down the “free sample” offer, but has yet to comment publicly on the breach. Over 260,000 records were exposed to search engines, meaning that they may have been picked up. There was no financial information but apparently people’s names, addresses, and the product they were interested in can be found in the records.

Comments on several sites range from blaming consumers who should "know better" than to put identifiable information into an unencrypted data field to warning of the potential harm that could come to people revealed to have received free samples of lubricant. I sympathize with people who are having information they considered private exposed in this way, but I also wish that we were at a point where personal lubricant use was about as interesting as what kind of shoe you wear. It will be interesting to see if this story has legs or dies off, which might say something about how far we are from the lube=shoes world I dream of.

Read more - HomelandStupidity.com: Astroglide data breach exposes customer information (via BoingBoing)

Related - Personal Lubricants

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