WTF?! Comcast has done it again - the company says it accidentally published the personal information of 200,000 customers, including names, addresses, and phone numbers. Affected customers have been given $100 in credits and the possibility to change their phone numbers at no cost, which is probably not enough. This has invited a lot of criticism on support forums and could lead to a class-action lawsuit.
According to a report from the Denver Post last week, the company accidentally made public the personal details of 200,000 customers in an online directory called Ecolisting, which is operated by Comcast and accessible to third parties.
The affected customers are Xfinity subscribers, and make up around two percent of Comcast's total of almost 10 million voice customers. The company discovered the issue in November 2019, and decided to shutter Ecolisting and compensate customers by offering them a $100 credit.
If you want, you can also ask Comcast to change your phone number free of charge, but customers have been complaining on the support forum that all of this isn't enough. The company told Ars Technica that it has sent emails to all affected customers to apologize about the issue, and in light of the complaints it has given them an additional $100 credit for the trouble.
The problem here is that Comcast customers have seen this before. A 2010 data breach affected 74,000 customers, resulting in a $33 million settlement in 2015. And more recently, its online customer portal partially exposed personal details like the social security numbers of 26.5 million customers.
Some Xfinity customers are looking to file a complaint with the Attorney General's office, and this comes at a particularly bad time when Comcast is being criticized for price hikes in its customers' bills for a streaming service that was advertised as a free perk.