In 2006 the New York Times inadvertently released the names and credit card numbers of 227,000 readers. Unlike Sony’s recent blunder, the newspaper giant did it the old fashioned way: printed on recycled paper.
Readers of The Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram & Gazette (both of which the NY Times Company owns) reported that their normal newspapers arrived topped with the private data, which were part of a recycled paper program used to wrap the leaflet bundles.
The mishap caused the company to expend resources going door to door, where they were able to retract only around 1,100 of the precious “toppers.”