The saga of Astroglide customer information being leaked onto the Internet appears to be coming to a close. The company has finally managed to remove all of the data from its Web site, as well as from Google’s cache, and someone finally managed to reach a company spokesperson to get a statement.

Not surprisingly, the spokesperson tried to blame Google for the data breach, which exposed over 260,000 names and addresses of people who had ordered free samples of Astroglide products from 2003 to the present.

The breach was discovered last week when a customer looked up his name in Google and found his order for a free sample of Astroglide. The customer then contacted the company to complain. And while the company initially removed most of the personal information from its Web site, it had originally failed to remove all of it, and failed to have the information removed from Google’s cache.

At least one other customer came forward, posting on a Web forum over the weekend that her information was also exposed (and that the sample was “dried out” upon receipt).

And the company said that it didn’t do anything wrong when it published thousands of customer records on the Internet, including that internal spreadsheet named SilkenSecretSummary.xls containing 4,529 records of Silken Secret orders. I just took another look at it, and it’s dated September 17, 2003. How did that get onto www.astroglide.com?

Biofilm Inc. blamed Google for the mishap, which allowed the names to be picked up by Google’s cache, or record of Web pages. A search for a customer’s name in Google could find that order, along with the person’s home address and product requested.

“We received a call from someone who had looked up his own name on Google and found, among other entries, his request for an Astroglide sample,” Lisa O’Carroll, vice president of sales and marketing for Biofilm, said in the statement. “We immediately investigated and discovered that this was limited to Google. Text files were not available on Yahoo! or other search engines.” — North County Times

A letter one person received back from the company Tuesday and posted to the fatwallet.com web forum said that “Although what has transpired was beyond our control, BioFilm has always made the security of our internet customers a top priority and we deeply regret this unique and unfortunate incident.”

The company’s own web site is beyond their control? I think not. How else could they have published their own customer data — or removed it after someone complained? How soon they forget that I, and quite a few other people, saw the data sitting right out in the open on astroglide.com. I somehow don’t think Google did it.

BioFilm, Inc., wouldn’t be the first company to blame Google to credulous reporters, though, and probably won’t be the last. Remember, nothing gets into Google that wasn’t published — intentionally or not — on the Internet for all to see.

Astroglide, if they don’t start owning up to their mistakes, may find their customers start slipping away.

On the topic, I had a pleasant conversation with a reporter from the San DiegoUnion-Tribune, the company’s local newspaper, where I provided some background information. His story appeared in that publication on April 29.