In November last year, reports emerged that VTech's Learning Lodge, the electronic toy maker's app store database, has been compromised.
The security breach that occurred exposed the private information of almost 5 million parents and over 200,000 children, in what is deemed as among the biggest hacking attacks that have ever been documented.
The personal information obtained by hackers included the names, email addresses, home addresses and passwords of VTech's customers, along with the names, genders and birthdays of their children.
VTech is now relaunching Learning Lodge, with the online app store now featuring security upgrades that will look to protect customers from having their data compromised once again.
"After further strengthening our data protection, the Learning Lodge service is now back online," wrote King Pang, the president of VTech, in an email to the company's customers.
However, it would seem that VTech itself is not that confident in the additional security that it has applied to its Learning Lodge, as revealed by a line in the website's terms of service.
"You acknowledge and agree that any information you send or receive during your use of the site may not be secure and may be intercepted or later acquired by unauthorized parties," says the controversial line under Limitation of Liability.
VTech customers who unknowingly agree to the Learning Lodge's terms of service will then have no grounds to complain if the online app store is hacked again and their data is compromised, due to that line.
Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, who was the first to discover the clause, said that it is not clear when the line was added to the terms of service. The document, however, says that it received an update in Dec. 24, 2015, which was around a month after the VTech hack was exposed.
The line has since received criticism from security experts, as it places all the burden of ensuring online protection on consumers. However, VTech is standing by its updated terms of service.
A spokeswoman for VTech said that while the company has worked to improve the security for its products and services, no company can fully guarantee that it will not be hacked.
"The Learning Lodge terms and conditions, like the T&Cs for many online sites and services, simply recognise that fact by limiting the company's liability for the acts of third parties such as hackers," the spokeswoman said.
