Sears fixes security/privacy hole on ManageMyHome.com due to public outrage

Talk about quick action on the part of Sears - less than one full day after news that their ManageMyHome.com website allowed access to any Sears customer’s prior purchase history, the retailer has fixed that “feature” of the site.

 Sears disabled the “Find your products” section after it was pointed out on several popular blogs and websites (this one, of course, The Consumerist, Digg, and others). Privacy advocates also wrote articles of their own, saying that fraudsters could use information provided by the site to scam Sears customers.

Sears issued the following statement:

“We take our customers’ privacy concerns very seriously. As a result, we have turned off the ability to view a customer’s purchase history on Manage My Home until we can implement a validation process that will restrict access by unauthorized third parties.”

This oversight was actually a violation of Sears’ very own online privacy policy. That policy doesn’t allow the company to share users’ purchase history with the general public. Ben Edelman, a professor at Harvard Business School, blogged about this fact yesterday.