In the modern world, we all must guard our personal information as best as we can. Social media, banks and other important sites get hacked with regularity. Here at SG, we put your personal privacy first, which is why we don’t make you log in to anything here, and we’re too lazy to really care about your personal information, anyway.
However, not all identity theft comes from the Internet, sometimes, they come from some very analog places. Last week, we were all reminded of this when the confetti from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade ended up being shredded police documents.
Now that’s a reason to watch the parade.
Celebrations in New York have always had a theme of giving away protected information for free. Remember the term “ticker-tape parade”? That was back when we actually used tickers to report things like stock prices. People would take these long spools of paper, some of which containing sensitive information that could be used to shape the markets, and throw them out the windows when some hero would come back in triumph. This is why tall buildings don’t have windows that can open — well, that and suicide.
The Santa Claus at the end of the Thanksgiving parade has been known to point at people in the crowd and yell out their bank account numbers, and under city regulations, it is perfectly acceptable for New Year’s Eve revelers to pee into bottles and discard them in Times Square, provided they write their Social Security numbers on them.
But last week, people found that the confetti contained private information like license plate numbers. As it turns out, they were actually shredded documents from the Nassau County Police Department, which means that if you got arrested or filed a police report in that county, there’s a good chance your information was raining down around you.
Don’t blame Macy’s for this, they say that they get their confetti from a commercial confetti maker, not shredded documents — that they know of.
Some of the pieces even had details about the motorcade of then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for the debate at Hofstra University. Can you imagine what someone could do with that information? They could tell you about a motorcade that happened over a month ago for a politician who ended up losing. This is valuable stuff!
Nassau County police are looking into how their documents ended up getting shot into the air, so look forward to that report to be released in pieces during next year’s parade.