Chicago Tribune: Social Security numbers found lying in street
The Chicago Tribune reports that private data has been found strewn on a street in Des Plaines, Illinois.
Hundreds of sensitive, intact documents — including W-2 forms, investment account balances and job applications — were inexplicably swirling around Touhy Avenue and Eastview Drive on Thursday afternoon. After being tipped to the airborne paper trail, the Tribune contacted some of the people and companies listed on the documents.
None of them knew how the papers could have ended up in the street. [...]
Privacy experts say the loss of confidential paperwork illustrates that even in an electronic age, stray documents remain a danger.
“It’s a lot more frequent than people would suspect,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. “Most of the time it’s just not discovered.”
His group, which pushes for tighter privacy laws, tracks breaches of sensitive information. Though computer hackers are behind most such data loss, careless document disposal still causes problems. Since 2006, the clearinghouse has noted 33 cases of legal, medical and financial paperwork discovered in trash bins. [...]
Des Plaines police said Friday they had no reports about the paper trove.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau, whose Touhy Avenue headquarters are close to where the documents were discovered, had its employees collect as many as they could and plans to return them to the people named in the papers.
“If we see who belongs to the stuff, we will get it back to them,” spokesman Frank Scafidi said. “It’s definitely not ours.”
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