FTC apologizes for leaking attendee details … to privacy conference

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has put in a strong bid for the 2016 Ironic Idiocy Award when they sent the details of every attendee to one of its conferences to every other attendee. The conference? Privacy CON. The conference, taking place today in Washington DC, is heavy on university research and covers topics like " …

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Oops..

...move along now, nothing to see here...

[Alexander J. Martin]

10/10

Sometimes there's so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can't take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.

[CrosscutSaw]

Re: 10/10

That was thee best Alex. LOL.

[agatum]

Paris, cause she can't for the life of her remember which field to use, either.

[Oengus]

Icon says it all.

[rtb61]

A US government conference on privacy, let's guess, they are all uniformly concerned about their own personal privacy but, well, screw everyone else, they need to be monitored, informed upon and censured.

[Bumpy Cat]

From the sounds of it the government employees are in the minority. The academics and journalists are likely to be on the side of privacy - certainly in the computer science dept where I study there's a lot of focus on enhancing and strengthening privacy.

[Winkypop]

"will work to ensure that this does not occur in the future"

Said: Horse agistment manager and stable owner, Mr G.G. Bolt

[Mark 85]

This is in the best tradition of the US Government after the precedent set by OPM and others.

[Alister]

This was, of course, done deliberately to act as a talking point for the conference...

No?

Oh well, worth a try.

[Terry 6]

Welcome to the 21st Century

People make mistakes. People will always make mistakes.

That's normal and to an extent excusable.

But when the mistakes are predictable and common then systems should, by 2016, have been developed to trap them. Sadly, often it isn't so.

Reply all and cc/bcc are obvious ones.

They were designed in a time when things were simpler.

But they linger on.

[paulf]

"We are assessing how this happened..."

Someone pushed Ctrl+V one field too early when sorting out the email and didn't realise.

Hope this helps.

[2460 Something]

Brilliant, an actual laugh out loud moment. Accidents happen, not the first and definitely not the last. It will happen again. And I will laugh about it again when it does :)