Some Amazon users woke up to a disturbing email from the online retail giant, just a few days before the expected heavy traffic of their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. They informed affected users that their email addresses and names were “inadvertently disclosed” in a data breach caused by a technical error. While that’s already bad news of course, the company has not given any other details about how and when this happened and what effects this may have on consumers, even as they have assured them that the problem has already been fixed.
There were a few versions of the email. The first one states that their email address was disclosed because of the aforementioned technical error. Another version stated that it wasn’t just their email address but also their full name, which may be more dangerous of course. In both cases, Amazon said that the issue has been fixed and that there’s no need to change passwords or take any other actions.
Of course, that’s not really very reassuring, especially if you’re very much concerned with privacy and security issues over the Internet lately. And the lack of details from Amazon about this technical error is also pretty disturbing. They did not share how this happened, to whom the data may have been exposed to, how long the data was exposed, and also how or if the data was actually accessed.
Amazon reiterated that their website and servers were actually not breached and that the email was just out of caution. Knowing what exactly happened or even just a bit more transparency over the issue will still go a long way in reassuring users that their data and information is still secure with the company.
Being one of the leading online retail stores, they have a lot of our data and so we just want the assurance that it is still safe despite the glitch. Even though they say you don’t need to change your password, you might want to err on the side of caution and just change it if you want to.
VIA: SlashGear
