October 21, 2000

8:25 AM

Bankruptcy without style:living.com posted their employee (and customer) data on their web site when they "made their documents public." It included salaries and addresses of employees. "Privacy advocates said it appeared to be the first bankruptcy filing posted on a retail Web site and a cautionary tale about the posting of private information that is contained in a public document."
posted by bison (11 comments total)

What the hell?!? Why would anybody want to do this??? Terrible terrible terrible. :(
posted by PWA_BadBoy at 8:32 AM on October 21, 2000

As a former employee, i'm a bit pissed.
posted by jbelshaw at 9:58 AM on October 21, 2000

Technically, all of that is considered public information. It's just that it used to filed in the public record with a court clerk in some dusty office. Anyone who wanted to visit the office could access the info.

But now with the wonderful magic of the Net, you can do it from the comfort of your own home!

posted by Steven Den Beste at 10:28 AM on October 21, 2000

So what were the salary ranges? :)
posted by mathowie at 10:30 AM on October 21, 2000

yeah, i wanna know too. we creative directors are sooooooooooooooooo undervalued.

(right.)
posted by patricking at 11:14 AM on October 21, 2000

Not sure if anyone else tried this, but right after the News.Com story was published I headed over to living.com and noticed that most of the files that had links removed from the front page were still available for viewing in the directory with modified file names. Anyhow, I talked with the News.Com reporter who notified the trustee about the mistake. The files are now gone. There was supposed to be an "update" on the story, but I guess it got scrapped. =)
posted by tomalak at 11:34 AM on October 21, 2000

I went through a tech company's bankruptcy from 1995 to 1998 as an employee (an interactive TV company -- we were burning through millions and going broke long before it became fashionable in the dot.com world).

One thing I learned from the process is that bankruptcy courts and trustees are incredibly clueless when it comes to dealing with high-tech. The Living.Com URL is probably the most valuable asset the company has, and by associating it with the bankruptcy filing instead of shuttering the site, the trustee is damaging it.

In the case of my company, the trustee organized an auction for the assets that was supposed to fetch $250,000 to $500,000. None of the bidders showed up, and the trustee told me that the judge was so pissed he probably would have sold the entire thing to me for $300! I'm still bitter that I didn't snap up my company, which lost $15 million for TCI cable and other investors, at that bargain price.
posted by rcade at 11:52 AM on October 21, 2000

actually, I think the chairs, at about $28,000 are the most valuble asset. The name is now mud.
posted by bison at 2:39 PM on October 21, 2000

no-longer-living.com?
posted by dhartung at 3:37 PM on October 21, 2000

Well I looked for salaries but couldn't find them. Saw a bunch of employee names but no job description attached.

What do you bet Martha Stewart buys the domain names?
posted by Brilliantcrank at 4:59 PM on October 21, 2000

shouldn't they call themselves dead.com?
posted by Adman at 11:37 PM on October 22, 2000