In a case of good intentions gone wrong, an employee at Rock You sent out an email to their entire list of publishers, ad networks and advertisers. This was the message:
Hi Publishers,
If you haven’t noticed already, we have a new website for our ad network up and running. We’ll be updating our blog with great content that will contain up-to-date information about the industry and contain helpful hints and tricks to help you monetize your applications! Please visit www.rockyouads.com to check it out!
Also, I want to remind everyone to please change their ad tags to reflect the changes in our ad servers. Please replace any old ad tags with the new ones provided in your account. Or you can replace the:
http://www.rockyou.com/ams/ad.php?placeguid=…..
with
http://rya.rockyou.com/ams/ad.php?placeguid=…..
Regards,
aaron
–
Aaron Choi
Manager, Business Development
RockYou
Turns out that instead of BCC’ing the recepients which would make each recepient anonymous, the employee put all recepients in the CC list, for everyone to see. How extensive was the damage to RockYou? First off this email set off a web-rage of activity. Some started marketing to the list immediately, promoting their current job openings, others used it to find influential publishers, or advertisers and ad networks looking to take advantage of publishers with a large inventory.
My take on this is, once you release information to ANY source, you’ve already increased the level of risk by X factor. Do what you can to mask your identity, not only for personal reasons, but apparently so your not left clientless or jobless.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:59 am
rya.rockyou should be closed down. The place basically is designed just to shake cash out of absolute retards, it posts absolute lies all the time, and they dont even try with the lies, 95% of all people at least would be certain they are lies, unless I am too generous on mankind, eg on facebook they post psudo alerts such as you being tagged, but the thing is they actually use your friends list unless you ask facebook not to give your information to adds, yes you have to actually tick this box, its not ticked by default. It is an absolutely shameless content deprived slum of the internet, its excess redundant pages like this that ruin the internet.