Sony: Can't say if PSN hack put personal info at risk

With the PlayStation Network outage now in its fifth day, concerns have begun to mount that the hack that took the online gaming network offline may have involved some type of data loss. Sony representatives continued to stay mostly mum, only willing to confirm that an "intrusion" had indeed happened.

In an interview with IDG News Service, Sony Computer Entertainment spokesperson Satoshi Fukuoka said that the company had not determined whether or not sensitive information had been compromised. Fukuoka said that if the company did find evidence of such an issue, users would be notified "promptly."

While the PSN service itself is free, Sony does collect credit card information and stores it on the company's servers. The privacy policy for PSN provides for such behavior. In addition, personal details such as the user's name, email address, postal address, and date of birth are also collected.

Sony itself posted an update, but again it provided little detail other than what it had already been saying publicly for the past several days. "I know you are waiting for additional information on when PlayStation Network and Qriocity services will be online," senior director of corporate communications Patrick Seybold wrote on the official PlayStation Blog. "Unfortunately, I don't have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time."

Without online services, the PlayStation 3 is a crippled console. Worse yet, several blockbuster games were released recently -- many of which heavily lean on PSN for their gameplay. Frustrations have been boiling over, not only here on Betanews in comments to articles on the subject, but on other tech news sites as well.

"This is bull, just because of kids and them hacking," user 'Wolfshadow' commented Monday. "Declaring war against a company. You wont win. Makes me laugh. Pathetic."