Eric Chabrow writes:
Make a donation to a charity, and the thanks you get could be exposure of your personally identifiable information.
IRS Form 990, submitted annually by tax-exempt organizations, is a public document, unlike Form 1040 individual taxpayers file. Form 990 isn’t supposed to contain personally identifiable information, but some organizations include such data, nonetheless.
Todd Feinman, chief executive officer of data-loss-prevention tool provider Identity Finder, says a search his firm conducted of nearly 3 million IRS Form 990 tax returns filed for 2001 through 2006 found that 132,362 charitable organizations published 472,866 Social Security numbers, of which 171,005 were unique.
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