RadioShack’s bankruptcy auction may include your personal data

By Benjamin SnyderManaging Editor
Benjamin SnyderManaging Editor

Benjamin Snyder is Fortune's managing editor, leading operations for the newsroom.

Prior to rejoining Fortune, he was a managing editor at Business Insider and has worked as an editor for Bloomberg, LinkedIn and CNBC, covering leadership stories, sports business, careers and business news. He started his career as a breaking news reporter at Fortune in 2014.

Photograph by David Paul Morris — Bloomberg via Getty Images

If you shopped at RadioShack before the company started closing its stores en masse earlier this year, your personal data could be up for bid in the company’s bankruptcy auctions.

More than 13 million e-mail addresses and 65 million customers’ names and addresses are included in the RadioShack auctions that began this week, Bloomberg reports. The data trove could also include information about shoppers’ buying behavior.

However, two separate legal challenges could prevent RadioShack from auctioning off customers’ data. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argues RadioShack agreed not to sell customers’ data, while AT&T says some of the company’s data about shopping habits actually belongs to the telecom company, Bloomberg notes.

Whether or not RadioShack survives the bankruptcy process depends largely on whether a federal bankruptcy court approves what’s said to be a successful bid for the company’s assets by hedge fund Standard General. RadioShack said when it entered bankruptcy last month it planned for Standard General to take over up to half the company’s retail locations and turn them into stores for Sprint cellphones. The court’s decision on approving or rejecting Standard’s bid is expected later this week.

RadioShack’s sales dipped 16% in its last quarter with losses spanning 11 consecutive quarters. The company said in its Chapter 11 filing that it had $1.2 billion in assets along with $1.39 billion in debt.

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