clark-kent 3 hours ago

They need to own up to their mistake sending PII to an analytics tool. They could have easily sent a uuid identifier for each user instead of email, name and organisation. Seems like a major blunder on their side.

Hannah203 18 hours ago

Good write-up. Incidents like this show how easy it is for data to leak through third-party tools, even with good internal policies. The more dependencies a product has, the harder it is to keep the full chain secure.

  • polack 16 hours ago

    That’s why you should only export anonymous information to external parties. There is no valid reason for OpenAI to export my personal information like this.

    I will report OpenAI to the data protection agency in my country and I encourage others to do the same. They can not blame Mixpanel when they sprinkle others personal information around like this. NOT OK.

    • Ntrails 4 hours ago

      I find throwing mixpanel under the bus whilst ignoring the giant elephant of "why were you giving them that user data in the first place" to leave a sour taste

      • ngcazz 29 minutes ago

        Pretty big red flag, as if the revelation they were having a data protection amateur hour wasn't enough

    • dependency_2x 12 hours ago

      PII info

          Name that was provided to us on the API account 
      
          Email address associated with the API account
      
          Approximate coarse location based on API user browser (city, state, country)
      
          Operating system and browser used to access the API account
      
          Referring websites
      
          Organization or User IDs associated with the API account
      
      Rookie mistake for a billion dollar plus company, let alone the most valuable in the world.
someone1998 15 hours ago

Why would they share name & email with a frontend analytics tool, this feels super amateurish. This information serves no purpose for analytics.

myth_drannon 15 hours ago

That's a lot of PII sent to an analytics tool. How is that even possible? That's a gross violation of GDPR and done by an established company not some amateurish startup.

rvz 17 hours ago

Oh dear. Appears that there is another impending disaster with lots of affected customers about to respond to this incident from Mixpanel. CoinTracker had the same problem. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065208