Essential accidentally shared customer's drivers licenses over email

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Call it a rookie mistake, but Essential has admitted to accidentally sharing customer's drivers license information via email. In a bizarre turn of events, Essential requested customers who pre-prdered the Essential Phone to include their drivers license info to verify shipping information.

The unfortunate result of this was that crucial personal information was leaked via email to other customers and exposed customers to phishing scams. Not a good look for a company that's desperately trying to make an impact.

"Yesterday, we made an error in our customer care function that resulted in personal information from approximately 70 customers being shared with a small group of other customers. We have disabled the misconfigured account and have taken steps internally to add safeguards against this happening again in the future. We sincerely apologize for our error and will be offering the impacted customers one year of LifeLock. We will also continue to invest more in our infrastructure and customer care, which will only be more important as we grow," Essential CEO Andy Rubin stated in a blog post. Affected customers will get a year of LifeLock protection against identity theft.

@essential You are making it extremely hard to not regret my decision to pre-order when you keep missing promised deadlines. #essentialphone

— Casey Gates (@CaseyGates43) August 25, 2017

From shipping what seems to be an unfinished product with pending software, delayed product shipments,  vagueness as to when media review units will be available, and now a sloppy security breach show Essential still has much to learn in this industry.