Well, I thought I’ld try something today.. Reading SFGate’s article about googling for CIA agents, I began to wonder “How many Social Security numbers could I get from google?”

Well, thanks to google’s new search by numrange feature, I entered the following query “427-55-1000..9999″ and awaited my results.

I was very disappointed to see The University of Southern Mississippi appear on the first page, with a link to an Excel Spreadsheet containing the Names & Social Security numbers of over 400 students. I’ve already sent an email to the person responsible for the website, and hopefully they’ll take it down fast. To make it even worse, this isn’t some obscure item that google accidentally picked up on, and a sysadmin forgot to delete. This spreadsheet is directly linked from their HTML pages. The columns are just hidden from the default view, but it doesn’t take a genius to reveal them.

Somehow I doubt I’m the first person to stumble upon the link. Perhaps, I’m the first nice-guy to stumble across it tho. :-(

Update: Thanks to my old boss Micheal Lane for reminding me about an a similar incident at Old Miss..

Update: July 16th, 10:49am Well, as of now, the page is down. In face, the entire NCATE website is down. Maybe someone got the point? Unfortunate, the google cache is still live & accurate. And it doesn’t even require Excel.

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