TOKYO: Toyota Motor said on Wednesday that the information on customers in some countries in Oceania and Asia, and also excluding Japan, may have been left publicly accessible from October 2016 to May 2023.
According to Reuters, the Toyota company said customer information may have been accessible externally, including names, phone numbers, email addresses, vehicle identification, and registration numbers.
The incident follows its announcement this month that the car data of 2.15 million users in Japan, and almost the entire customer base who had signed up for its leading cloud service platforms since 2012, had been publicly available for a decade because of human error.
The international largest automaker by sales said the latest problem was discovered when it launched the broad investigation into the cloud environments managed by Toyota Connected Corp after the earlier incident.
Toyota said, “We believe this incident was caused by insufficient dissemination and enforcement of data handling rules … we’ve implemented a system to monitor cloud configurations.”
A company spokesperson for Toyota said that the company was investigating the problem based on the laws and regulations of each country.
Toyota didn’t say how many customers were affected by the incident, in which countries they’re located exactly, and whether customers of its Lexus brand were affected.
The company said only part of customers’ information may have been externally accessible, the company said.
Toyota said it had investigated whether there were any third-party copies and use of its customer data and found no evidence of such use. Still, car location and credit card information weren’t included in the incident.
The spokesperson said that the company initially uncovered the incident announced this month by chance during inspections that started on April 7.
