A scary story out of the L.A. Times: Social networking site divulges child’s personal data

“Jane Yang, a 30-year-old marketing coordinator, was curious the other day to see what would turn up if she searched for herself on Reunion.com, a Los Angeles-based social networking site.

Sure enough, there was her name, which didn’t bother the Oregon resident all that much. Nor was she particularly troubled that her husband’s name was included under her “Friends & Family.”

What did startle Yang was seeing the name of her 4-year-old son.”

There are several scary things about this story, the least of which is the fact that a 4-year old’s identity information somehow found its way onto the reunion.com’s servers and into public view.

One is that Yang found this information by chance, which suggests that this is only a single case of a much larger problem. Another is that reunion.com’s CEO has absolutely no clue about how or where his company gets information.

“He (the CEO) said he can’t explain how the name of Yang’s 4-year-old son made it online, or where it came from in the first place. In fact, Tinsley said he doesn’t know where much of the data on his site originated.

The information, it seems, was purchased from a “data broker”, who apparently sold as many as 260 million records (almost the entire population of the United States!) to the site this spring while promising that nobody under 18 would be included.

Whoops.