| Hello all,
This post is for all NEO subscribers who are worried about the data held about them by Uncooked Media, specifically regarding safety and security following what appears to be an unauthorised distribution of a MyM sampler to the majority of the NEO subscriber list.
First and foremost we want to assure you all that the data affected was name and address information only, and nothing more. No credit card or bank details are stored with this list or anywhere else, so any breach of the security of this data, is of no direct financial threat.
Secondly, I need to say that nothing has been proven legally. Legal advice has been taken, but due to the nature of proving the extent of actual damages, no legal proceedings have yet to be made.
So, what actually happened? Well, what follows is our candid, informal account of what we suspect to have taken place, along with our reasons for thinking such. So to be clear, this is what we think not what we know. Nothing has been proven legally, so we can't formally announce any accusations as facts. This is simply what we believe to have happened.
As some of you may be aware, MyM is run by a former director of Uncooked Media. MyM is not affiliated with Uncooked Media in any way. We want to make that clear.
MyM was started following this person's dismissal from Uncooked Media, so there is definitely zero collaboration. And Uncooked Media definitely did not 'help out' MyM by giving/selling subscriber data.
Before departure, we believe this person copied and took the subscriber list. This person was, being a company director, in charge of this list, so at the point of dismissal was required to hand it over to the company's control. This process wasn't immediate, because apparently the server was broken and needed to be fixed before it could be given. We suspect this is when data was cloned.
When the server was returned, it was checked over as you'd expect, and in doing so simple admin errors were noticed at this moment. Subsequently, the errors were fixed, but a snapshot of the old data was stored. This ended up being pretty crucial.
Recently a lot of NEO subscribers received MyM samplers. This understandably caused genuine concern among subscribers regarding data security and some people believed that Uncooked Media had sold their data.
We urged people to send in their MyM envelopes. We did so, because we remembered the errors on some of our addresses prior to update. In ALL instances, address errors/misspellings present in the Uncooked database snapshot are replicated exactly on the MyM sampler envelopes. Which, we see as a strong indication that MyM used information taken from Uncooked Media. Once again, I must stress this is what we suspect and not anything that's been proven legally.
We're not the only ones that see a connection: the company that sends out the subscriber copies of NEO each month, Postcare - who were also hired by MyM to distribute their sampler - now won't deal with MyM.
So that's pretty much what we think has happened. While Uncooked takes the safety of data seriously, in this instance it's pretty much impossible to lock out a company director from data over which he has full control and prevent him from cloning information. If he wants it, he's going to take it.
Still, we apologies to our subscribers for the worry caused. Rest assured that no live database was at any point hacked and no financial information was at any point leaked - our systems are safe. |
