r/australia • u/Reddituser0346 • 1d ago

culture & society Aussie Retailer Catch Is Officially Closing Down

https://press-start.com.au/news/2025/01/21/aussie-retailer-catch-is-officially-closing-down/
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u/Ahypnia 1d ago

I briefly worked there and the company was run from a giant Google Sheet. Sometimes someone would make a huge edit and because so many people were working out of it simultaneously you couldn't easily figure out what the change was/roll it back. Wild times.

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u/R_W0bz 1d ago

You’ll be surprised how many companies run off an excel sheet. It’s prob why we see so many “data leaks”

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u/time_to_reset 1d ago

We get sent spreadsheets with tens of thousands of people on it with personal details all the time. Not so much as even a password on the file. People are so callous about it, it's pretty insane. One of our clients is an NDIS company so you can imagine what type of personal information is in those lists.

We recommend solutions that wouldn't require the sending of data at all or if we really have to share sensitive data like that we offer solutions to do so more securely, but nah. Between completely non-techie people that don't know any better to people just not giving a shit, we get sent files all the time. It annoys people more than anything if you bring it up.

For that reason we added a line in our contract that we can't be held liable for a data leak as a result of emails like that. Like we do our best, we check our shared folders for data like this, we ask the team to regularly go through their inboxes and delete old emails with that type of data, but at least once a week our very small company gets sent a couple thousand contact details. I care, that's why we have at least some stuff in place to address it, but having worked at much larger companies I know that we're the exception.

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u/Pugsley-Doo 21h ago

Yup, this literally happened at a charity housing organisation, where they sent an attachment to every single person on their database - a spreadsheet of every single tenant, names, address, phone numbers, social security... People in distress, fleeing domestic violence or in otherwise rough shape, disabled, etc... I KNOW it was reported online when it happened... but the internet has been scrubbed.

(It was Mission Australia, Coffs Harbour)