Phil Villarreal writes:
After accidentally sharing the email addresses of gamers who complained about having to use their real names on World of Warcraft-maker Blizzard’s forums, the Entertainment Software Rating Board offered this mea culpa:
Yesterday we sent an e-mail to a number of consumers who wrote to us in recent days expressing their concern with respect to Blizzard’s Real ID program. Given the large number of messages we received, we decided to respond with a mass e-mail so those who’d written us would receive our response as quickly as possible – rather than responding to each message individually, as is our usual practice.
Through an unfortunate error by one of our employees, some recipients were able to see the e-mail addresses of others who wrote on the same issue. Needless to say, it was never our intention to reveal this information and for that we are genuinely sorry. Those who write to ESRB to express their views expect and deserve to have their contact and personal information protected. In this case, we failed to do so and are doing everything we can to ensure it will not happen again in the future.
Read more on The Consumerist.