Essential Phone News: Customers View Other People's Personal IDs Following Mistaken CC Email
Recently, it was learned that some staff member of the startup company Essential made a mistake of sending carbon copy emails to several customers which led to the accidental sharing of personal identification numbers.
Emails sent in CC mean these are messages openly shared to a group of people. It works much like a conference message or group chat, which means any replies to the sender is also made available to other receivers of the email.
Recently, a customer who ordered the Essential Phone shared on Reddit how personal IDs of other buyers were unwittingly shared to strangers.
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According to Reddit user Cygnosity, Essential sent an email "saying they won't ship my order until I send a Photo ID."
The official email requested for buyers to send "additional verifying information to complete the processing" of Essential Phone orders. "This verification is performed to protect against unauthorized use of your payment information and similar to what is conducted for in-person purchases," the email continued.
The email asked the buyers to send a picture of a photo-bearing, valid and preferably government-issued ID that shows the billing address given at the time of the online purchase.
However, the Redditor noticed that it was best not to respond to the said email after noticing that it was sent as a carbon copy to other Essential Phone buyers.
At first, the Redditor and other commenters on the thread thought it was an email scam. User Cygnosity raised even more concern because, if it was an email modus, the idea that crooks got accurate email addresses of legitimate Essential Phone buyers is even more frightening.
Essential CEO Andy Rubin confirmed in a later blog post that it was not an email scam but was a human error on their part.
"Yesterday, we made an error in our customer care function that resulted in personal information from approximately 70 customers being shared with a small group of other customers," Rubin explained.
The CEO assured customers that they "have disabled the misconfigured account and have taken steps internally to add safeguards against this happening again in the future."
