About this blog

Bob Sullivan

Corporate sneakiness. Government waste. Technology run amok. Outright scams. The Red Tape Chronicles is MSNBC.com's effort to unmask these 21st Century headaches and offer real solutions that save you time and money.

Bob Sullivan covers Internet scams and consumer fraud for MSNBC.com. He is the winner of multiple journalism awards for his coverage of online crime and author of Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day and What You Can Do About It. and Your Evil Twin: Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic.

Got some red tape you want Bob to untangle? Write BobSullivan@
feedback.msnbc.com.

Cop's errant click posts personal info

Posted: Monday, November 6 2006 at 05:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan

There's a new reason to be concerned about an encounter with local police, whether you're a victim or a suspect.

In Ohio last month, a police department accidentally published intimate details about every person officers encountered during a single day, including Social Security Numbers, driver's license numbers and more.

A stray click led the Bowling Green, Ohio, Police Department to publish the wrong report to the agency's police blotter Web site on Oct. 21, according to operations Lt. Brad Biller. Instead of posting a sanitized blotter, with all the personal information redacted, the agency published what is known as an "end of day report."

That report includes birth dates, SSNs, race descriptions, license numbers and more on each of the nearly 200 people the cops had contact with that day. It also included extended narratives about each incident, written by the responding police officer.

"A dispatcher ran the wrong report and provided the wrong report to the technology people," Biller said. "We uploaded the wrong report."

Web surfer Ann Snowberger, who lives in Three Forks, Mont., alerted MSNBC.com to the error. She found it using Google while she was researching an individual whose name appeared in the report.

That person, whose name MSNBC.com agreed not to publish, had been given a warning on Oct. 21 because she had not properly displayed her front license plate.

"Much to my horror," Snowberger said. "I discovered that the Bowling Green Police department has published 52 pages (of the report) on the Internet."

By the time MSNBC.com searched for the report, it was no longer available on the Bowling Green Web site. The city only stores 7 days worth of reports on its site. But a cached version of the report was stored on Google's servers, and was accessible Friday afternoon. The cached version was removed after MSNBC.com contacted Google.

Inadvertent publication of Social Security Numbers on government Web sites is nothing new. Private information can often be found on county tax records, divorce or bankruptcy proceedings and other public documents published by local agencies.

MAIN PAGE NEXT POST Phishing gets much more profitable

Email this EMAIL THIS

TRACKBACKS

Trackbacks are links to weblogs that reference this post. Like comments, trackbacks do no appear until approved by us. The trackback URL for this post is: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b0aa69e200d834c6e81653ef

BUY BOB SULLIVAN'S NEW BOOK

Cover_crunched_by_media Bob Sullivan's new book unmasks hundreds of hidden fees and offers step-by-step instructions on how to fight back. Order it here.

Also available as an audio book.

Red Tape Video

RED TAPE ARCHIVES

More consumer news

Consumer Man, aka Herb Weisbaum, exposes scams and answers questions

Other useful links