Popular sexual lubricant manufacturer Astroglide is blaming Google for indexing a partial customer list that Astroglide accidentally surfaced on the Web. The pages were removed by Astroglide, but not before Google indexed them in their cache.
“We received a call from someone who had looked up his own name on Google and found, among other entries, his request for an Astroglide sample,” reads an Astroglide statement. “We immediately investigated and discovered that this was limited to Google. Text files were not available on Yahoo or other search engines. Although this was clearly a Google issue, Astroglide didn’t want to waste any time in fixing the problem in order to protect the security of our customer files. We have never sold nor shared any of our database information, and we don’t even recontact people. Although what transpired was beyond our control, Astroglide has always made the security of our internet customers our top priority and we deeply regret this unique and unfortunate occurrence.”
Obviously the files should never have been stored on a Web server, period. The full story is at Wired’s Threat Level blog, which also notes a new lawsuit against Google by a building contractor.