In case you live in the woods (and if you do, then how would you read this?), Sony blew it. After antagonizing the “hacker” community by going after the man responsible for jail breaking the PS3, they suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of a massive network assault that has brought the PlayStation Network down for close to two weeks. More importantly, the personal information of 77 million users is now in the hands of people who have already shown little regard for things like laws. When the PSN first went down, people were confused, thinking that Sony was doing some unannounced maintenance. But as time dragged on with no official word from Sony, it became clear this was no simple tune up. It wasn’t until the 26^th of April, seven days after Sony first learned that their network had been compromised, that they decided to put up a blog post about what had happened. For people who don’t check gaming sites that often, emails came later; I received one on the 28^th. With a disaster on their hands, Sony execs apologized to the world, promising that people’s credit cards were safe and that the network would be restored shortly. But the damage had been done.

For Sony, this is basically the worst thing that could ever happen to their PSN. Judgment Day has arrived, and there is no John Connor to bail them out. In order to have a viable online marketplace, it is essential that consumers can trust the company with their information, both personal and financial. Without that trust, the entire PSN ecosystem comes crashing down. Consumers don’t want to use a suspect service and developers don’t want to make games for a platform no one wants to use; it’s a pretty big deal. Anyone who watches sports knows that it is never the first hit that draws the penalty, but what happens after that draws the ire of the refs. It wasn’t getting hacked that caused the outrage with Sony, but their reluctance to come clean about what happened.

It was Sony’s duty to alert those at risk as soon as they knew there was even the possibility of a breach.

Companies will always be under siege from bad people, but with the possibility that personal data was stolen, it was Sony’s duty to alert those at risk as soon as they knew there was even the possibility of a breach. The fact that they did not warn people at risk at the first sign of risk is inexcusable. Things move fast in the digital age, and if you don’t get on top of a situation like this, it can have both long and short term effects on your finances. I simply cannot comprehend how Sony did not know that such a risk existed, and even when they did know, did not send out emails to every person with a PSN account. To have a two day break between the initial posting of the blog post to having the news arrive in my inbox is simply unacceptable. There is already a class action in the works, and a number of high level government officials from different countries are looking into what happened, so I am not alone in my outrage.

Realizing that they had a disaster on their hands, Sony announced on Sunday that to make up for the down time, everyone would receive a free month of PSN Plus. While this is a nice gesture, to me, this is far too little too late. I have had to cancel my credit card and now have to worry about another being opened in my name with the data taken from Sony’s servers. When I see this free month of PSN Plus being offered, I just can’t help but remember all the cards I’ve received in Xbox games that can be redeemed for a free month of Xbox Live. To me, this looks like just another marketing tool companies use. Hell, Hulu offered all its PS3 users a free week of their service because of the network crashing and they have zero connection to Sony! I don’t really care about getting a free month of a service I had no previous interest in, what I care about is being informed in a timely manner that something serious has happened. Sony has lost my trust and some temporary discounts won’t be enough to rebuild it. This loss may not hurt Sony this generation, since we already have invested in PlayStation 3s and are not going to deprive ourselves from purchasing games we would like to play. But new consoles are on the horizon, and how many people are going to compare the offerings from Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony and look back at the handling of this situation and pass over the next PlayStation? Even though I love games, regardless of who makes them, I’m going to have a hard time convincing myself to pass over any of my hard earned cash for Sony’s next big thing.

[image credit: flickr / wlodi]