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Customer names, phone numbers leaked in HP v. Oracle

As HP builds its case against Oracle over the Itanium platform, it has published more than 100 Oracle customer complaints -- with contact information and all.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

It's been a haphazard week for the security of personal data with major leaks at LinkedIn and now Last.fm.

You can add some probably now-unhappy Oracle customers to that list thanks to some legal documents that have popped up in the hardware giant's legal battle against Hewlett-Packard going on right now.

As reported by Wired, Oracle received "hundreds of complaints" from customers after the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company announced it would be discontinuing support for the Itanium processor, making a lot of HP databases rather useless. In a nutshell, that's what started this whole lawsuit in the first place last June.

But now, those customers might regret their inquiries for the sole reason that their contact information, including names, email addresses and phone numbers, is included in HP's repertoire of evidence. Thus, they can all be found online and available to the public.

Presumably, a lot of these requests are probably coming from business sources and customers, thus they probably don't include a lot of home addresses and personal cell phone numbers. So perhaps one could argue a lot of this information is already available to the public, but now you can just deduce who is (or was) an Oracle customer using an HP server running on Itanium.

Nevertheless, no one likes it when their contact information is leaked anyway, so there are bound to be some unhappy clients right now.

The case is currently being tried at the Superior Court of the State of California in Santa Clara.

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