Have you googled your Social Security Number Lately?

  • Comments: 1
  • Written on: May 14th, 2008

One of my employees at Schrock Innovations was doing some vanity searching with Google and decided to pop in his Social Security number.

When the results came up he was surprised that a telecom company in the Czech Republic had his Social Security number posted in an Excel Spreadsheet on a public server.

Never mind the obvious question of what a Czech company needs an American’s SSN number for or how it got there… The real question is if the data was legitimately compiled, what in the world is it doing on a public server?

Being the coder that he is, my employee decided to refine his Google search to see if there were any other Excel spreadsheets on the public server. The results of his search revealed more than 163 results containing HUNDREDS of what appear to be Social Security Numbers.

I am not familiar with telephone numbers in the Czech Republic, so I suppose it is possible that the numbers in the spreadsheet could be something else that happens to be nine digits.  One of those nine digit numbers could have happened to be a social security number as well.  In fact, some of the lists appear to have near sequential numbers.

Either way, I was spooked and I popped in my number and received zero results.  What do you find for yours?

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