My Waste data breach
The City of Winnipeg apologizes for any inconvenience that the My Waste data breach has caused. We take this matter very seriously and have been working with Municipal Media, the owner of Recycle Coach/My Waste, since their data breach was first announced. We are currently reviewing our agreement with them, to ensure that our customers are better protected going forward.
Municipal Media did explain that the data breach was related to an email distribution list they provided to an external email service provider (MailChimp) back in December 2017. This list contained about 55,000 email addresses of customers across North America, of which approximately 3,500 were from Winnipeg. The exposed user information in this breach was restricted to email addresses – no customer names, locations or passwords were accessed. Since the discovery of the breach, Municipal Media has expanded their security and password protections to include any third party services they work with.
To clarify, the breach was related to a third-party application (MailChimp) and is not a breach of the Recycle Coach/My Waste App customer database. It only affected a small portion of our customers - those who had signed up to receive email messages from Recycle Coach/My Waste before the end of December 2017.
We encourage residents not to open any suspicious emails or click on any unknown web links.