I just received an email from Rich Johnston promoting a post on Bleeding Cool. I found it odd since I’ve never received anything from him before and we’ve never met or made contact of any kind. Yet here was the email which I received at two of my email addresses.
This immediately annoyed me as it’s the same thing that happens when I get emails from Titan…And then the lightbulb went off. So I quickly went through the emails I’ve received from Titan’s senior press and marketing officer Owen Johnson. On July 19th during San Diego Comic Con he sent out an email without masking or BCCing the recipients but displaying all 480 email addresses of basically anyone who would be in a press-like position around comics.
I work in the tech industry and have seen people get into serious trouble for this, basically revealing client lists. Now this isn’t that serious since all of us have our email addresses out there on web sites and public forums, but it is a major gaff. There’s a chance I’m wrong and Rich just happened to have gathered the same addresses, but I doubt it. I’d like to believe this kind of thing was beneath Rich Johnston, but if you’ve read Bleeding Cool you know that isn’t the case. Poor form.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/apr/26/email-data-protection-breach
I have known many people make that mistake, indeed!
I have even seen that mistake being made by an IT-headhunter.
Tres dommage… but human mistakes tend to be made from time to time.
It’s not the revealing of the emails that troubles me, it’s the nefarious use of those emails by other parties.
Oddly enough I started receiving emails from your company about an hour after the Titan gaffe.