Update Aug 2, 2012

There’s been an important update to the way your email addresses are stored.  Many sites, including DanceMinder prior to today, store your email addresses unencrypted in their databases.

If you follow tech news at all, you will have heard, seemingly weekly, about major sites being hacked and at best user email addresses becoming available to spammers and in some cases even the passwords were available or easily cracked.

DanceMinder now stores email addresses in encrypted form.  Your password has always been stored encrypted and now, even if something happens to our servers and a hacker manages to get hold of our database, your email addresses and passwords will both be safe.

Now for an example.

On most sites around the world, your email address is stored in what’s called cleartext, like this:

[email protected]

This means that if the site in question is ever hacked, the hackers have your email address.

It also means that while they might not have your password, they can look through data from other sites that have been hacked and if they find your email address, they can compare other data to attempt to figure out your password.

Since DanceMinder now stores your email address in encrypted form, the worst thing that will happen if they manage to compromise our server is that they’ll see an email address like:

Uy5SssxIlNCY+rIqahM9XaOKb/hL9ZI6Dbc3eM

Which isn’t much use to a hacker.

So, use DanceMinder with confidence.  We’ve got your back.