On April 12, a customer contacted Astroglide after searching her name using Google and finding information regarding her request to receive a free sample of personal lubricant.
Lynne Merrill, an Astroglide representative, told XBIZ the company discovered that the search engine giant had "aggressively indexed" — made note of and re-presented the information as a search result — a portion of Astroglide's sample requests made primarily between August 2003, and January 2004.
Information included customer names, email addresses and shipping information. No credit card or financial information was revealed.
Astroglide.com webmaster Matthew Eckmann told XBIZ that after adding new internal links to the company's archives, it is possible that Google's normal indexing procedure picked up on the site's new information. Eckmann said Astroglide.com's pages usually remain unchanged 85 percent of the time.
Eckmann said that Astroglide first changed the location of all files that could potentially be indexed and then changed the code in the site to prevent any future indexing. Merrill said that because there is no live Google support, Astroglide had to uncover and solve the problem itself, following Google protocol and a removal tool recently made available by the search engine.
As of today, Eckmann said the glitch has been fixed. All pages and caches of customer data have been removed and placed in a secure location on the Astroglide site. Measures have been taken to prevent further indexing of this information.
Astroglide.com's free-sample request has been temporarily deactivated.