Welcome, boys and ghouls, to a Halloween edition of gremlins-in-the-news. I’m not talking outages that are just inconvenient. I’m talking violations (software-related but not necessarily bugs) involving your privacy, trust or safety.
We are all vulnerable to technology’s accessibility, lack of privacy, and reach into our personal finances. But while the largest numbers of people affected may be shocking, those may not be the creepiest cases.
What about revealing information about children? Or selling recalled products? Or stealing your money? Or secretly storing information about electronic sex toy use? Like “It” or hate “It”, we all have our own private fears. Below is a list detailing some of the violations discovered or settled this year:
| Who | People affected? | Settlement and/or more details |
| Home Depot | ??? | $5.7M, for selling 1000’s of products after they were recalled for safety reasons |
| Peppe’s Pizza | ??? | No fine, not lots of people, but public facial recognition commentary (age, gender, eye contact duration) was publicly displayed. Creepy? |
| OKCupid | ??? | Trying for $5M, baited users to pay only to discover that their match is no longer an active member |
| We-Vibe | ??? | $4M, for privately collecting personal information on how customers used Bluetooth-enabled sex toys |
| 1 Hotels | 1 | All hotel charges fitting a certain pattern were charged to a prior hotel guest whose payment info should not have been retained |
| UK company operating in Italy | 583 | €5.88M, for sending money to China without consent |
| Florida Blue | 9,500 | Repeated e-draws (like charging 26x) of legitimate single charges causing overdrafts |
| St. Joseph Health | 31,800 | $2.14M, new server was missing security settings |
| Three Mobile | 210,200 | |
| Wonga | 245,000 | |
| Bupa (healthcare) | 500,000 | |
| TalkTalk | 500,000 | £100,000 |
| Horizon BCBS | 690,000 | $1.1M |
| Spiral Toys | 2,800,000 | With data on 800K kids interacting with virtual pets |
| Vizio | 11,000,000 | $2.2M |
| NICE Systems | 14,000,000 Verizon users | |
| Ashley Madison | 37,000,000 | $11.2M, publicly revealed spouse cheaters |
| Anthem
|
79,000,000 | $115M |
| Target | 110,000,000 | $18.5M, data breach settlement |
| Equifax | 188,000,000 | $200M |
| Deep Root Analytics | 198,000,000 | |
| Yahoo | 500,000,000 people, 3B emails | (discovered this year, but occurred earlier) |
