Kindly blank out the email address of the first entry in the screenshot in this article.

You’ve inadvertently shown the whole world how much he has in his account.

Niyi

There are so many people that don’t even realise that their password is transmitted in cleartext.

So was it Yahoo’s fault or not? Who did the appending?

I think the more important question is: Why trust Yahoo with your financial information, your identity, etc.

First of all, I’d like to sincerely apologize for the issue that caused multiple emails to be sent containing the financial updates of other Rudder users.

We have created a post which provides the details of what happened, along with our detailed response to the issue – http://rudderup...ate.tumblr.com/

I’d like to reiterate our apologies to those affected. Although nothing in the email would enable recipients to access bank accounts, withdraw funds or transfer money, our users’ peace of mind is of utmost importance to us. Therefore, we will provide affected users with a subscription to an Identity Theft Monitoring service, paid for by us.

Your trust and security is of utmost importance to us and we will go above and beyond the call of duty in every aspect of our business in order to regain your confidence.

We at Rudder sincerely apologize for the issue that resulted in the financial updates of up to 732 of our users being sent to one another. We have identified the problem, assessed the full scope of the issue and have implemented measures to ensure that it will never happen again.

Although nothing in the email would enable recipients to access bank accounts, withdraw funds or transfer money, our users’ peace of mind is of utmost importance to us. Therefore, we will provide affected users with a subscription to an Identity Theft monitoring service, paid for by us.

In addition, we promise to work tirelessly, from here on out, to restore user confidence.

We have set up a hotline for concerned users to call – (877) 730 4914 extn 0.

Here’s a summary of what happened:
On May 18th, 2009 we made a change to our utility that generates custom email updates for each individual user. On the morning of May 19th, 2009, the first time the emails were sent out after the change, instead of sending out emails to each individual user, a bug in the utility caused it to append several email addresses together. The issue was detected early and subsequently all email communications were stopped. However, incorrect emails were sent to users whose email addresses started with either a number or the letters “a” or “b”. In total, emails were sent out for 732 users (less than 2% of Rudder’s user base). We’d like to reiterate that Rudder has “read only” access to your account balances and transactions. We do not store account credentials like user names, passwords, or your personal information like name, address or social security number.

To be clear this incident was not the result of a security breach, nor was any third-party hacker involved.

We greatly appreciate the generosity that the Rudder user community has shown us thus far, and for those of you who choose to continue managing your finances with us, we will go above and beyond the call of duty in every aspect of our business in order to regain your confidence.

Anyone who wishes to cancel their account and delete all associated data may do so here https://www.rud...r.com/settings/.

The online banking industry itself (including companies large and small) has been grappling very publicly with issues of security and privacy for many years.

More than anything, we hope that users do not let this incident discourage them from pursuing the benefits of managing their finances online, regardless of which provider they may use. Improving Americans’ financial health has been our mission since day one, and we continue to believe that this new generation of personal finance management applications, including Rudder, have the potential to change the world for the better.

Sincerely,
Nikhil Roy
Founder & CEO
Rudder.com

but this is why I don’t use these young companies just yet – want to see them last a few years then will be on board. Sorry Mint, et all, but having ID theft is a nightmare – takes years to unravel.

@Rob Silver: Nope. I’m actually speccing out a new feature (coming in late June!) at the moment, and keeping TechCrunch open in a side window to drop quick comments. Because I know that people are helped by personal finance sites (data is awesome), I wanted to make sure that one error by a single company didn’t cast doubt over a whole cluster of sites.