Privacy incidents can happen to more technical users, too

Jul 3, 2015 17:36 GMT  ·  By

AMO developers that signed for a free T-shirt from Mozilla had their information exposed for a short period of time due to poor configuration of the online form that collected the data.

On June 15, AMO announced that the community chose Erick León Bolinaga as the winner of a T-shirt design. Any developer who fit one of the three criteria imposed was eligible to become more fashionable and receive one of the printed shirts.

Data of 70 AMO developers leaked

To qualify, a developer has to have an add-on listed on AMO or to be a background theme designer with at least 10,000 users. If the developer does not have an add-on published, they at least have a signed extension.

Anyone fitting one of the three eligibility categories has to reserve their T-shirt by signing up on a Google Form, providing their full name, full address, phone number, and T-shirt size.

On Thursday, Mozilla announced that these details belonging to 70 developers had been accidentally exposed.

“This document [the Google form] was mistakenly configured to allow potential public access for less than 24 hours, exposing the response data for 70 developers,” Mozilla said in a brief blog post.

All developers have been informed of the incident

The issue here is not that the data could be used for nefarious purposes, but that privacy blunders happen even to the more technical users. Luckily in this case, the problem was spotted quickly and permissions were changed to block public access to the document.

Mozilla said that the leak was discovered by a developer. There is no evidence that an unauthorized person viewed the content of the file.

“We have notified the affected individuals. We regret any inconvenience or concern this incident may have caused our AMO developer community,” the blog post says.