In colossal screw up, Essential shared customers’ driver’s licenses over email

“Last night, some customers who had preordered an Essential phone received an email asking for a copy of their driver’s license, ostensibly to verify their address in an attempt to prevent fraud,” Dieter Bohn reports for The Verge.

“Customers replied with their personal information, but those emails didn’t just go to Essential; they went out to everybody who had received the original email,” Bohn reports. “That means that an unknown number of Essential customers are now in possession of each other’s drivers license, birth date, and address information.”

“The incident is being reported as phishing by many outlets, because it looks and smells quite a lot like a phishing attempt: a weird request for personal information. After examining the email headers, it doesn’t look like this was an actual phishing attempt. It seems much more likely that this was a colossal screw up, the result of a misconfigured customer support email list,” Bohn reports. “Notably, Essential itself has said very little, beyond the following tweet, which doesn’t characterize the email as a scam and further notes that ‘we’ve taken steps to mitigate.’ Those “steps” appear to include, at minimum, shutting down the email list that everybody was replying to.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: All three of them?

Quelle tragédie!

Essential obviously cares as much about protecting users’ privacy as Google.

What wise smartphone buyers already know: If it’s not an iPhone, it’s not an iPhone.

SEE ALSO:
Former Android head Andy Rubin leaving Google – October 31, 2014
Prior to Steve Jobs unveiling of Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android didn’t support touchscreen input – April 14, 2014
Before iPhone, Google’s plan was a Java button phone, Android docs reveal – April 14, 2014
How Google reacted when Steve Jobs revealed the revolutionary iPhone – December 19, 2013
Apple to ITC: Android started at Apple while Andy Rubin worked for us – September 2, 2011