League of Legends Accidentally Leaks Personal Info to Other Players

A lot of League of Legends players aren’t too happy with Riot Games at the moment when some found information they weren’t supposed to have. Earlier this week a privacy error by Riot ended up sending out player personal info to other players. This gave perfect strangers access to phone numbers, email addresses, detailed histories, and more – all of which violated privacy standards.

Though clearly a mistake, many in the community are taking to the game’s forums, as well as other places such as Reddit, to complain about the given info – some even threatening to sue. No one knew how widespread the issue was until ‘ZainTheOne’ took Reddit to share his own experience, including a recount of the customer service he received:

“I requested account data about 30 days ago and today realized 30 days had passed and i was yet to hear a reply. So i requested a human that its been 30 days and i haven’t received my account data. After a few hours i get a reply from a rioter with a zip file. Upon opening it its someone with name “***”(can i disclose it?) and not me. I just sent them email that this isn’t my account data and yet to hear a reply. Either way this is a serious issue because if i have someone else account data who has mine?”

Below is the email he received from Riot Player Support:

Since then, several other players have come forward to mention that something similar happening to them, with one player even mentioning they were thankful for Zain’s honesty. After the conversation went on, Riot themselves replied to the growing thread with the below statement:

“This is definitely unacceptable and we’re sorry this happened. Based on your experience we have temporarily paused manual reviews of data requests while we investigate this situation further. Most of our data requests are automated, and we’ve confirmed this system is working properly so these will continue to be processed as normal, but we are temporarily pausing those that are handled by an agent during our investigation.

Your info is precious, we take it seriously, and we will get better.”

After a few hours passed, they then added an update to keep players in the know of where they were at with the investigation:

“Normally, data requests like these are handled by an automated system. In this case it was handled manually, and through human error the wrong file was sent to the wrong player.

Most importantly, we’ve gone through every other request that was answered manually and can confirm that this was an incredibly rare incident. We’ve individually contacted the few players affected.

We also reviewed the automated system that normally handles these requests. It is working as intended and it will continue to respond to them. The mistake that was made in this process is a clear-cut one, and we’re taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

A messy situation that honestly could have been a lot worse. It seems to be under control now, for the most part, and Riot Games is painfully aware of the issue. If you think you might have been hit with this error, please contact Riot Support.