It’s been quite the tumultuous year for GPU maker Zotac, what with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) bearing down on the company over its “dodgy” warranty practices. As if things weren’t bad enough, the company may have accidentally made its customer’s personal details publicly available, and even indexed by Google.
According to the report by the investigative journalist Gamers Nexus (GH), The Zotac incident exposed Return Material Authorisation (RMA) requests by making them publicly searchable. These documents include customers’ full names, contact number, emails, mailing addresses, and so on and so forth.
The viewer who clued in GH to the snafu had apparently done their own diligence, to see what information came up when they Googled their own name. It was then that they discovered their own document they had uploaded to Zotac, as part of an RMA return. At which point, he notified both Zotac and GH, the latter then taking to X, formerly Twitter, to post of the issue to see how long it would take the former to fix the issue.
And the good news is that it didn’t take Zotac long. As of this publication, searching “RMA Zotac” still yields a search of hundreds of PDFs and Excel documents but should you click on the links, you’ll find that they are now dead, likely due to the GPU maker having corrected the misconfigured file permissions for that directory.
That said, Some information can still be sniffed out from Google’s cache, meaning that some details could have made it through the net, figuratively speaking.
(Source: Gamers Nexus, Tom’s Hardware)
