Washington – The Census Bureau inadvertently posted personal information from 302 households on a public Internet site multiple times over a five-month period, the bureau said Wednesday.
The information included names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and family income ranges, said Ruth Cymber, the agency’s director of communications. No Social Security numbers were posted, and there is no evidence that the information was misused, Cymber said.
But, she added, posting the information violated bureau policies and federal law.
The bureau is in the process of contacting the households, located in nine states and the District of Columbia, to offer free credit-monitoring services.
“A breach of this kind is unacceptable,” Census Bureau Director Charles Louis Kincannon said in a statement.
The information was on and off the public website from October to Feb. 15 as Census Bureau employees working from home tested new software, Cymber said. They were supposed to use fictitious information, but they inadvertently mingled data from the bureau’s Current Population Survey, a monthly survey best known for generating the nation’s employment statistics.
The incident comes six months after the Census Bureau acknowledged losing 672 laptop computers since 2001, including 246 that contained personal data.
