Advice Required - My Personal Data is on Google!

[sa_20v]

Hi people, was looking through Google just now and stumbled across something extremely alarming. It appears that Googlebot has somehow indexed a cache, containing a years worth of my email (both business and personal). The data now freely available on Google includes bank acc numbers and friends email addresses, basically anything I sent in an email during 2004 and 2005! The email account was part of the hosting package I bought back in 2003 and i'm still paying for this service. What do I do now, I have informed the hosting company of the issue - but do I take this further? And if I was to do so, can anyone guide me in the right direction?

The hosting company is reasonably small and i've let things such as outages etc go without issue, but this goes too far.

Stephen

[Balmoral Green]

[ewenm]

I'd give the hosting company time to come up with a solution (a few days) then start talking about the data protection act etc etc.

[pwig]

What's your name, just so I can check of course



(Anyone for a holiday? )

[agent006]

Not got Google desktop installed have you?

[sa_20v]

agent006 said:

Not got Google desktop installed have you?

No, this has been indexed from the hosting site itself.

[Marki]

Shite thats scarey stuff

[targarama]

OK, who hasn't just googled themselves?

[paulie-mafia]

That is worrying - can't imagine how this info got from your email cache onto the web.

Just Googled myself and, aside from a few press releases, it seems I'm anonymous!

[sa_20v]

So what do I do now? Should I claim compensation, aside from warning all my friends/business contacts that their details may be on the web?!

[pwig]

Woo first result is a racing driver by my name

[tallbloke]

I'd give the hosting company 24 hours to get it offline, and send a 'stiff letter' threatening to sue them intil they bleed if they fail to comply.

Which hosting company? P.M. me their name please.

>> Edited by tallbloke on Wednesday 22 February 18:22

[sa_20v]

tallbloke said:

I'd give the hosting company 24 hours to get it offline, and send a 'stiff letter' threatening to sue them intil they bleed if they fail to comply.

It's now offline, but in Googles cache, no doubt until the end of all time. This the way I originally accessed it.

>> Edited by sa_20v on Wednesday 22 February 18:23

[zaktoo]

oh, and switch hosting providers, immediately. There's just NO excuse for this level of -uppery.

[Mr E]

UK hosting company?

[sa_20v]

Yes, UK hosting company, small to medium size.

[simpo two]

Would a firewall have stopped the Googlebot, or from sending all this info going up the line?

[sa_20v]

Their firewall should have stopped this from occuring, however, a simple file called robots.txt (a file that can either block or instruct spiders) could have also haulted the crawling of the files.

[mel]

Guess what comes up if you put in "March 20th" (just incase you missed the other 37 threads about it)

[s a m]

Email me and I can set you up with a robots.txt to sort out the problem.

Added: I can probably get it dropped from cache within a day or two.

Regards,
Sam

>> Edited by s a m on Wednesday 22 February 19:08