Google Employee Records Stolen

Although not widely publicized in the news, two bloggers, Garett Rogers and Brendan Chase, reported Google employee records were breached May 26.

Chase reported, “Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company Google and other companies use to handle human resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on May 26. An undisclosed number of employees' details and those of dependents such as names, addresses, and Social Security numbers were on the stolen computers. It is understood that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information.

“It's still unclear how many more of Colt Express' clients were affected by the breach."

It is known, CBS' CNET Networks, publisher of News.com, was also affected by the burglary, with about 6,500 employees' details stolen.

“Although there is no evidence of misuse of the data to date, the information obtained could be used by identity thieves to create fake accounts and identities.”

Danny Thorpe, former chief scientist at Borland and engineer at Google who now works for Microsoft, was informed of the theft on July 1.

According to Thorpe, Google has offered to cover the cost of a one-year subscription to a credit report and identity theft-monitoring service. Similar benefits were offered to CNET Networks employees.

Dealing with the theft of employee records was not Google's only privacy issue problem this week.

Rogers went on to report, “on top of [the identity theft], Google was ordered by a judge to hand over terabytes of YouTube logs to Viacom in [the media giant's] lawsuit against Google. Even though this is clearly something that affects the privacy of anyone that has ever used YouTube.”