Oops…Wrong Button

Ticketek — the Australian equivalent to America’s Ticketmaster — seems to have an “Expose Private Info to the Internet” button within its internal mail client.

Someone at the ticketing agency recently sent out a message to all its customers about a concert pre-sale. The message also, however, contained tens of thousands of private e-mail addresses from its database. Anyone hungry for spam?

Ticketek told The Age the screw-up was a simple matter of “humor error.” They really should place that “Expose Private Info” button farther away from the “Send” command.

Apparently, Australia’s government is right now in the midst of revamping its Privacy Act to tighten restrictions surrounding electronic data breaches. Presently, commissioners say their guidelines are behind the times when it comes to these sorts of issues.

Ticketek, for its part, promised its staff will be apologizing to all of those affected by its slip-up. Of course, those apologies may be lost within the dozens of Viagra ads also now being received by those customers on an hourly basis.