My data has been breached

[Simbaya]

Respond please.

Thanks. It is so awful. I can't believe that this has happened.

@AuntieStella I agree with you. My comments were not deleted. I have never had a comment deleted. You can still get comments reported, especially if you are talking about a controversial subject on feminism or politics. Some people report just because they do not like what you said. Those people now have my identifiable email address.

It's not about 'having nothing to hide'. If someone who took a warped dislike to you for any reason decided to dig, putting together information about you from your email address, your MN posts and any other information they could glean from your online footprint, before long you could find yourself answering the door to pizza deliveries at 1.00am, having the police called to your house on spurious reports of someone having seen a firearm...whatever their twisted mind could think of to make life as difficult as possible for you, And the fact you lived a blameless life wouldn't make a gnat's ass of a difference to them.

Can you really not understand how an email address - especially an email address that immediately links someone to what could be a series of revealing posts about their life, their problems, maybe their location - is a piece of the jigsaw these people use to disrupt their targeted victims? Why do you think data protection is taken so seriously and there are sanctions for breaching personal data, which includes email addresses?

I don't believe the 20 people. I know three people including me affected by this.

Agreed. Justine's comments have been really unprofessional.

@SlatsandFlaps Nothing to hide?
So you don't care that someone who has an axe to grind against you knows how you have struggled with your 7 year old who is still wetting the bed? Or that they can link to your real-life 10 year old and read all about the bullying they experienced? Or comments where you think you messed up in your parenting?
Or comments about how shitty your sister was to you when you were breastfeeding?
I have discussed normal parenting issues on this site. But they are absolutely private and I would NEVER have talked about them if I was identifiable. My children do not need other people to know identifiable information about them. That would be humiliating and distressing for them.
MN is useless as a parenting site if privacy is not guaranteed. If all you are going to talk about are toilet brushes and TV stars then it is just a gossip site for bored housewives and I would never have joined in the first place.

Wait, what? I thought it was the deletion that triggered the inappropriate disclosure of the poster's email, that just a reported post was not involved. OMG.

Will have to go back through the threads and clarify, I expect I am misremembering.

I agree. If you don't care use your real name as your user name.
Except virtually no one does. Which shows they do care about privacy here.

Lots of banks have data breaches from wrong addresses on envelopes, to leaving laptops on public transport etc.

Any organisations can have data breaches, so care is needed before signing up, but once the data is transferred it is out of your control. People need to understand that using the same ID to access your sensitive personal data eg your bank account while publishing personal data across multiple sites which can be collated is in itself a security risk.

People should work on the assumption that their data will be subject to a data breach at some stage.

My mistake. Reported posts not deleted ones. Sorry.

@JustineMumsnet, for the love of God, please stop posting. You look more unprofessional and passive aggressive with every comment.

It doesn't matter if the OP is Hitler reincarnated. As a user of the site, s/he is entitled to the same data protection as the reincarnation of Mother Theresa. Reposting deleted comments when there are other ways of reassuring site users that there was no malicious intent and of contacting the OP is snide, immature and gobsmackingly unprofessional. This isn't the twee 'round the kitchen table' amateur operation any more, it's a multi-million pound business and as the CEO, you're damaging your brand by acting like an aggrieved sixth-former when the fact is it's YOUR IT fuck-up (again!) that has potentially placed users of your site at risk.

At the very least you should replace the post in which you quote the OP's comments with the "message deleted - quotes deleted post" standard MN moderation message while you concentrate on putting in place the necessary measures to minimise the chance of this happening again. I recommend a thorough overhaul of your database structure and employing some system testers who know what they're doing.

Given Justine herself had aSWAT team sent to her home a few years back, you’d really expect a different approach to this.

And no posting the comments is in no way reassuring there wasn’t a malicious report. But even if it was cast iron proof, it doesn’t make least bit of difference. People have personal information they shouldn’t and MNHQ has no idea what they may choose to do with it.

If @MNHQ had heeded their Irish and Northern Irish posters this thread would not exist as this OP would have been banned a long time ago. Instead they were allowed to run riot derailing threads despite numerous deletions and now here we are.

in my view our priority is to the people viewing this thread and clearing up things that could cause alarm.

None of that of course is anyway mitigates the fact we should not have breached anyone's details on monday pm and that we have a duty to protect all users' data

These two statements seem rather at odds with each other. "We're sorry, but..."

@JustineMumsnet

Again, can you confirm exactly how many people's email address were given out? And is @Simbaya the only user who was identified to multiple people?

I made a thread in Craicnet to let everyone know about this and it went poof. I'm beginning to think the OP works for MN.

@MNHQ why did you delete my thread without letting me know and for what reason?

Yup

I expect it will be because it was a TAAT, Jane

Is Justine trying to devalue Mumsnet for some reason? The way it is being run recently is how I'd go about it if I needed to devalue a business for some reason.

No I don’t believe them either but they’re sticking to that story. I’m sorry this happened to you

Thanks @BoreOfWhabylon that's probably why. Amazing how they spotted it so quickly!

I expect MNHQ is keeping a close eye on this thread Jane. I know I would be

@JustineMumsnet did you just say your priority is keeping the readers of this thread informed (we didn’t need to be informed of OP’s deleted posts, why would we?!) rather than the OP who has had her personal details emailed to strangers?! Fucking hell