E3 organiser says regaining media’s trust is ‘top priority’ following leak
Personal details from four separate years leaked online
E3 organiser The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has said winning back the trust of its media partners is its “top priority”, following a significant leak of personal details in August.
Up until the evening of Friday, August 2 anyone with the correct URL could access a list of personal details belonging to over 2,000 members of the media who attended E3 2019 in June, including their home addresses and phone numbers.
In a statement issued on Monday, the ESA claimed: “For more than 20 years, this has not been an issue.”
However, it has since emerged that three separate years’ E3 media lists were also available online, and evidence suggests that the ESA was informed about at least one.
The personal information of more than 2,800 people who attended E3 2004, 3,300 who attended E3 2006 and a further amount who attended E3 2018 was available on the E3 website until recently.
According to a GameDaily source, the ESA was informed of the 2018 leak in late 2018.
All lists have since been taken offline and the ESA sent an email to those affected apologising for the leak.
The ESA provided GamesIndustry.biz with the following statement on Wednesday: “Our top priority is to win back the trust of our media partners.
“We are working with outside counsel and independent experts to investigate this situation and enhance security efforts to avoid this from happening again.”
Shaq Kalaka, a privacy lawyer at Morrison Rothman, suggested on Monday that due to the harassment that will likely result from the leaked personal information, a class action lawsuit might be considered.
“The E3 data breach is one of the strongest cases I’ve seen for a class action involving location data,” he wrote. “Data breach class actions are usually hard to bring, but this involves some unique circumstances.
