Health club chain headed for the spa on choose a password day
A security researcher claims UK health club and gym chain Total Fitness bungled its data protection responsibilities by failing to lock down a database chock-full of members' personal data.
"This raises privacy concerns regarding how companies collect images of members or customers, how they are stored, how long they are kept, and who has access to them," said the researcher."Many people choose to stay private online and do not publicly share images of themselves, their friends, families, or children.
Total Fitness said that members' images only comprised a"subset" of the total cache, whereas other files included shots of artifacts like merchandise and commercial imagery. Regarding the number of images in the database, the health club chain stressed that only a very small number of the images contained personally identifiable information .
From the company's initial response to our questions, it doesn't sound like those who had only their images exposed will be notified, but"While an initial investigation found no data that could in of itself identify an individual, other than a photo of the member, we continued our analysis and conducted a more thorough examination, including an image-by-image check," a company spokesperson told us.
"We have made it a priority to ensure that images of members are not combined with other data that can identify the member through updates to staff and will make this clearer in our communication to new members who join via the app which does not involve staff intervention on upload of images," the spokesperson added.According to Total Fitness' logs, it said there was no evidence that any unauthorized party, other than Fowler, had accessed it.
There also exists the possibility that these images could be used by fake social media or dating app profiles to carry out romance scams.
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