From Bruce Schneier’s blog and Boston.com:
Tax liens, mortgage papers, deeds, and other real estate-related documents are publicly available in on-line databases run by registries of deeds across the state. The Globe found documents in free databases of all but three Massachusetts counties containing the names and Social Security numbers of Massachusetts residents….
It’s easy to say “we haven’t seen any cases of fraud using our information,” because there’s rarely a way to tell where information comes from. The recent epidemic of public leaks comes from people noticing the leak process, not the effects of the leaks. So everyone thinks their data practices are good because there have never been any documented abuses stemming from leaks of their data and everyone is fooling themselves.
It can only be a matter of time before a lawsuit is filed because of this type of data leak. I wonder what the repercussions of that would be?