But that transferred very sensitive data to a third party without anonymising the amount.
Just by replacing the email with a random anonymizedAccountId the impact would have been reduced from disaster to who cares. This was bad design from the start.
Just mind-bogglingly stupid to send anything about users other than a UserID number/UUID to your web tracking software.
Of course, in a sensitive situation such as that, even IP address can also be problematic, and your 3rd-party tracking software vendor gets that automatically.
If these clowns had hired someone smart instead of just copy-pasting some tracking code and throwing their whole user object at it or whatever, they would have given this some thought.
I'd have used the ability to proxy the MP tracking calls to my own server which most of these services offer but few use. That server would not keep any logs and would perform coarse GEOIP, remove the IP itself or zero the last 2 octets, and relay that information into MixPanel using custom attributes.
Just a quick back-of-napkin sketch, but even that was more thought than they put into it.
I get these spam emails all the time. Some "hacker" has my Pornhub history. They even have video (they "hacked" my laptop camera) of me, uh, enjoying myself. They're gonna leak all of it if I don't send them Bitcoin. I think it's hilarious because I'll provide that data to anyone who asks - no need for "hacking". But I'm 100% confident no one wants that data. LOL
Just by replacing the email with a random anonymizedAccountId the impact would have been reduced from disaster to who cares. This was bad design from the start.
We may see some interesting news in a few days.