Essential Phone founder Andy Rubin has apologized for errors in the company’s customer care functioning that led to sharing of personal information of around 70 customers with other customers.
In a statement posted on Essential’s blog, the Android co-creator said the company “made an error in its customer care function.” It seems a customer service rep used a misconfigured account that sent a single email asking for a photo ID and other identifying info to multiple recipients. As a result, around 70 of them ended up sending sensitive info to “a small group of other customers.”
The fault was stated in a Reddit thread which said that customers who had pre-booked the new Essential phone were asked to share their photo ID for shipping purposes. A photo ID comprising information such as a photograph, address and signature was shared with a group of customers to whom the email was sent.
While the Redditors complained of a possible phishing scam, Andy Rubin apologized for the misconfigured account and said that the account had been disabled.
Notably, Andy Rubin has offered a year’s worth of identity theft protection service through LifeLock and a promise to prevent something similar from happening again. Rubin said the company has already “taken steps internally to add safeguards against this happening again in the future.”