Google Picks Up Private Data, Including Tax ID Numbers, Mistakenly Put Online by L.A. County Employee
For the second time this year a breach of people's most intimate data has happened at the hands of Los Angeles County government.
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The first time involved a missing laptop that contained the names, dates of birth and treatment information of 667 patients at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center. This time around we have the online leak of 2200 records that include names, addresses and tax identification numbers of child care providers registered with the county.
Oops.
The breach was discovered last week, according to a county statement.
On Thursday the county's Internal Services Department was notified that a child care provider's info was clickable via Google link. Then if figured that about 2,200 others also had their info online.
Officials say it happened after an employee inadvertently put four files containing the data, in Excel and Word formats, on what was believed to be an internal server. Instead that info was accessible on the web.
The county states it immediately took the server offline and asked Google to nullify any links to the data, which it did.
Those folks whose info was exposed might be learning about it for the first time here, however. The county's statement:
The impacted parties will be notified of the potential exposure of their personal information. Also, an investigation has been initiated to identify and correct the process that allowed the placement of these sensitive files on a public facing server.
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