Who has security issues?
I give a custom, tagged email address to every organization that I do business with. This makes it easy for me to sort out various commercial email into separate files, but it also lets me know when and if my email address has been leaked by a company. This doesn't happen very often, but sometimes addresses get leaked. The following is a roster of which companies have data security issues:
- TD Ameritrade (twice)
- LiveJournal (twice)
- OpenTable
- Poker Players' Alliance
- Slik Stik
TD Ameritrade is the most interesting of these. It happened for the first time on December 12, 2005. At this time I contacted the company to let them know about the problem, and changed the email address that they had on file. The next time it happened was April 2007, contacted the company to report it, and changed my email address with them again. I finally heard from them about it in September 2007. This was eventually well-publicized, but I still have the very first spam that I got to an Ameritrade-tagged email adress.
LiveJournal has leaked my tagged email address twice, both times while it was owned by Six Apart. I didn't do much with that besides change the address.
OpenTable.com leaked my address around mid-July 2008. I wrote about it publicly, and was contacted just a few days later by their customer service manager.
The Poker Players' Alliance leaked my address sometime around late 2007 or very early 2008. To this day they deny that they had any data security issues, even though multiple people have reported receiving spam at addresses given only to the PPA.
Slik Stik seems to basically be a pond scum company.