Flood victims revictimized: another Metro identity breach of citizen personal information

A couple of days ago local tweets started crossing my feed that some flood victims' personal information, including bank account numbers had been posted on the Metro Tax Assessor's WebPro government site. Here is the Tennessean's follow up on the story:

Three property owners had private information exposed on the county web site, according to the Assessor's office. Rooker said he was first made aware of the information being posted by the Metro Legal Department this morning. As originally reported Dozens of flood victims seeking property tax relief may have had personal documents like checks [to pay for repairs] posted for public view on the Davidson County Assessor’s web site.

This is at least the 5th data breach of Davidson County citizen information since 2007, when laptops containing personal voter information where stolen from the Metro Election Commission. A Metro computer security laptop was stolen from a car shortly after that. Another incident involving exposure of 18,000 Metro Public School students' and 6,000 parents' personal information on Google occurred last year. Earlier this year an employee with Policy Studies, Inc. was given access to private Metro child support records with information like Social Security numbers, which he promptly attempted to sell.

Government just keeps privatizing more and more of its functions involving sensitive personal information without any accountability. Worse, yet, the information keeps getting breached. This running government like a business project does not seem to be working too well, especially for average Nashvillians. In the latest case, those who have already been victimized by May flood waters were revictimized by exposure of their identities.