United States Government Exposes Thousands of Americans to Identity Theft
For years, the U.S. Agriculture Department publicly listed Social Security numbers for tens of thousands of people who received financial aid from its agencies. Such publicly exposed data is ripe for identity theft. Officials at USAD and the Census Bureau, where the data was stored, said they did not realize the database contained Social Security numbers. The problem was reported, only last week, by an Illinois farmer who stumbled across the data on the internet.
Marsha Bergmeier, president of Mohr Family Farms in Fairmount, Illinois, said she “was bored and typed the name of my farm into Google to see what was out there.” The second link in the Google results was a site that she had not heard of, FedSpending.org, which was a searchable list of federal government spending. Bergmeier said she was able to identity almost 30,000 records in the database that contained Social Security numbers. A USAD official said they immediately took the information “down.”
Is there anyone out there, whose personal information is still personal?