If you participated in the alpha for indie MMORTS Starborne, you might wanna check your email: Multiple alpha participants are now reporting that they received a thank-you email that exposed the email addresses of a large chunk of other players, without permission. In other words, it looks like somebody at Solid Cloud took the email list and CCed when they shoulda BCCed, resulting in a painful privacy breach.
One pic from Reddit clearly shows a long string of email addresses (crossed out for privacy in the image); our tipster estimated around 50 people were exposed just in the one email, though depending on how many mails were sent, it could be many more.
It’s not clear what sort of recourse affected players have; Solid Cloud is based in the EU, Iceland specifically. It does, however, seem like an honest mistake and email-fail. (The actual bad guys sell your data; they don’t give it away in a thank-you email.) Either way, if your email is now floating out in the void, maybe double-check any of your associated accounts associated.
We’ve reached out to the studio for a statement and will update when we have it.
“Today we sent an email to our players to notify them of their promised rewards for participating in the Starborne Alpha. Unfortunately, this email was configured using the wrong protocols causing players to see the email addresses of up to 49 other recipients in the same batch. We reacted as soon as we noticed, immediately reverting to the previous protocols and our regular mail services remain unaffected. We are informing affected players of this issue and we will continue to personally respond to everyone who reaches out to us in regards to today’s incident. We take the privacy of our players very seriously and we are committed to learn from this mistake to ensure this never happens again.”
