The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission has reacted swiftly through the following media release -
The ACCC has today become aware of a breach of personal data collected from some of its websites.
The affected websites are Recalls Australia, Product Safety Australia, SCAMwatch and the ACCC Public Registers website.
The email addresses of some subscribers to the ACCC’s information alert services were inadvertently made accessible online.
They were not indexed by search engines or linked from a web page on our sites. They could only be found if specific URLs were tried.
The ACCC resolved this issue as soon as it became of aware of it to prevent further access to the email addresses.
The ACCC is investigating how this issue occurred and is reporting this breach to the Office of Australian Information Commissioner.
It is not yet clear to the ACCC how many users have been affected or how long this has been an issue.
The ACCC takes the issue of privacy, including any breaches, very seriously and apologises to affected users.
The ACCC has no further comment at this time.
It is refreshing contrast to belated responses by Telstra and other large organisations noted elsewhere in this blog.
