View your neighbors purchases at Sears

Gotta love the internet...

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/01/searss_privacy_promises_broken_1.html
Sears apparently sold their sales data to various data vendors and now you can check out your friends, family, and neighbors purchases at Sears by opening an account at managemyhome.com.

I checked my purchases and a few friends and found data going back to 1994. This is pretty disgusting and I'm guessing there will be a class action law suit any second now.

Gotta go see if my neighbors have any tools I might wanna borrow.

 

How nice of the media to not only advertise this invasion of privacy but to also give detailed instructions on how to exploit it. Wonderful. I wonder how much additional personal information has been viewed as a result of the article advertising it.

 

I'm not surprised or bothered by the media response. I'm more disgusted that the owners of the web site haven't removed or modified this little feature.

Sure does seem everyone shops at Sears though.

 

I just tried it and found every appliance that I've purchased from sears while living at my current address. It seems fairly picky in getting name, phone, and address correct so fortunately it's not that easy to exploit since you need to already know a lot of information about the person but I still think this needs to be removed.

I am not surprised at the media at all. This reminds me of right after 911 when the news did a bit on some fenced lot full of waste that could be made into a dirty bomb and gave local information or when it did a story on certain key bridges in the country and where the weak spots were that could be easily exploited by a terrorist. Surely those are points of concern that need to be addressed, but do you really need to give ideas to the wrong audience just for a rating? Sorry if my response diverts the point of your thread, but in general I really do dislike the media.