Fergie's Tech Blog

U.S. Database Exposes Social Security Numbers

Ron Nixon writes in The New York Times:

The Social Security numbers of tens of thousands of people who received loans or other financial assistance from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations.

Officials at the Agriculture Department and the Census Bureau, which maintains the database, were evidently unaware that the Social Security numbers were accessible in the database until they were notified last week by a farmer from Illinois, who stumbled across the database on the Internet.

posted by Fergie @ 4/20/2007 07:06:00 PM