Cupid exposed: access to personal inforation a breach of Privacy Act

Cupid Media (Cupid) operates over 35 niche dating websites based on personal information including ethnicity, religion and location. In June 2014, the Australian Privacy Commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim, found Cupid failed to take reasonable steps to secure personal information held on its dating websites when hackers gained unauthorised access to Cupid webservers and stole the personal information of about 254,000 Australian users.

The figure was reported to be 42 million users across the globe, however, this figure was disputed by Cupid's managing director Andrew Bolton. The personal information compromised at the time of the hack included users' full name, date of birth, email addresses and passwords.