This one comes straight from the “CYA” department.
Google, who’s great at indexing the nether-regions of the Internet, recently was found to be listing the social security numbers and test score of over 600 students from public schools in North Carolina. According to news reports, Google complied with a court order to delete the data from their site, however Google denies ever receiving a subpeona.
The Department of Homeland and Security hasn’t been the #1 friend of Google either. Recently Google was chastized for not simply providing the government with the search data as requested, without Court order. In our nation’s attempt to battle the latest evils evolving from the new constantly connected ether-world we live in is respectable, but they have to follow within the lines of the law.
First of all, Google doesn’t pry into backend systems or have super secret access keys at getting data. People need to understand that this is not Google’s fault. Holding it responsible for evaluating the content of billions of webpages is nearly impossible. Finding lists of social security numbers on the web is far from hard to do either. Someone, at the school, put it online and are trying to “c” their “a”.
The Social Security numbers and test scores of 619 students at public schools in Catawba County, N.C., were available online via Google’s search engine until Friday, when the company complied with a local court order to delete all information about that county’s board of education from its servers.
Google said it had taken down the information at the school district’s request, but said it had not been served with an injunction.
“The security hole came from possibly someone publishing the content publicly, somehow, or by letting down the security or by posting a hyper-linked URL with an embedded password in the URL,� Schwartz wrote on his blog Monday.
The students’ personal information was discovered last week when a relative of one of the students performed a Google search.
[ Source: Forbes.com ]
