Singapore — Hundreds of customers’ email addresses were revealed after Ikea inputted the information in the wrong message field and sent out promotional email newsletters on Thursday (Aug 1).
The company has since apologised on Sunday (Aug 4), but not before making another “embarrassing” error.
According to a spokesperson for Ikea Singapore, the company “regretfully made an error of inserting 410 individual e-mail addresses in the ‘To’ field in an Ikea Service Delivery Promotion e-mail sent to our customers.” Recipients of the message can then see all the email addresses, and possibly the names, of Ikea’s customers who also got the promo mail.
Upon realizing the mistake, Ikea hastily sent another email to inform the affected customers about the leak and express their apologies. However, Ikea sent an unfinished internal draft to its customers instead. The second email was sent to half of the intended recipients.
A Facebook netizen named Cherrylene Lee posted screenshots of the emails she received from Ikea, but the original post has since been deleted.Â
In a statement, Ikea explained the oversight: “In our haste to notify the customers as quickly as possible, we again made a mistake by sending half the recipients an internal draft of the apology notice instead, an oversight that we are embarrassed about,”
The company apologised for causing customers “unease and inconvenience” and also emphasized that it values its customers’ personal data integrity seriously.
Ikea said they are looking into ways to prevent the leak from happening again.
“Confidence and trust in our company including our data protection policies is important to us and we will look at and implement effective ways to prevent this from happening again, through reviews of procedures, technology and training.”/TISG