HootSuite Suffers Privacy Breach

Social media management company HootSuite recently acknowledged that e-mails sent to some users to warn them that their free trial of HootSuite Pro was about to end may have also included other users’ e-mail addresses, exposing the contact information of thousands of users.

“Scores of HootSuite users have taken to Twitter to voice their displeasure at receiving the flood of emails, with TNW reader Matt Navarra contacting us to share that he has already received more than 485 emails at the time of writing (some have reported more than 1000),” writes The Next Web’s Matt Brian.

“Hootsuite bought its one-time rival Seesmic in September for an undisclosed price,” explains CNET News’ Steven Musil. “As part of that acquisition, Hootsuite asked Seesmic business users to try HootSuite Pro for free trial period, after which they would be charged fees starting at $9.99 a month. The flub occurred as a result of migration of Seesmic users to the Hootsuite platform.”

In a blog post, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes wrote, “HootSuite experienced a technical issue related to our integration of Seesmic accounts with our existing HootSuite user accounts. The failing system resulted in email notifications intended for our new Seesmic users being sent out repeatedly and in some cases user email addresses were exposed in the message headers. … The incident occurred to under 4,000 emails.”

“Holmes asked those who received the flawed emails to delete them in order to help the firm contain the incident,” writes Softpedia’s Eduard Kovacs.