Bangalore: Private Company’s collecting user data over a period of time with or without users consent for a purpose sometimes are careless to protect it or make it public to gain more popularity or share it with third parties without users’ knowledge.

In honor of the National Data Privacy Day on January 28, PCWorld has put down the 15 Worst Internet Privacy Scandals of all times. These scandals touch many a private lives, technically exposing personal information submitted in confidence to companies or rout data on our phones or PC’s by secretly installing deeply rooted software which redirects our personal movements.

Sony CD- Rootkit Alert

‘Secretly- Deeply embedded- Invisible- Difficult to Remove’ define World’s second largest music label Sony BMG’s  antipiracy technology XCP, the best which has something called a rootkit installed on some of their CD’s. More difficult is that Sony Officials denied that this is a form of Spyware. But in retaliation to the Lawsuit filed Sony recalled the CD’s and also offered a free software to uninstall the rootkit.  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission however made it obligatory to Sony to pay $150 to any consumer whose PC was damaged by the software as part of a settlement for violating federal law.

Sexy Experiment by Craigslist

A prank played by blogger Jason Fortuny cost him a fortune by  posing himself as a ‘kinky sex seeking woman’ just to see the number of responses received in 24 hours. He actually received 178 responses, including photos, names, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers of the men. What Jason did later was a little startling; he pasted the detailed info on website Encyclopedia Dramatica more than embarrassing the respondents. Without doubt he was dragged to court and made to cough $75K as fine.