A woman who googled her name found her social insurance number, address, place of work and annual income online.
The information was all taken from a rental application she filled out two years ago.
“I felt violated. I felt scared,” said the woman who doesn’t want to give her name because of privacy concerns.
CTV News has learned more than a dozen other people whose information had been breached and all of them were linked to a business called RentCanada.
CTV News placed a call to a woman at her place of work – with a number taken directly from an online rental application.
She said she had no idea her information was publicly available.
I’m just in shock,” she said, “Like, I’m in total shock. I just can’t even think right now. It’s too much to swallow.”
She said she’s afraid of what someone could do with her information.
"Well, I'm concerned somebody's going to steal my identity. And god knows what they're going to do with it."
Senior management at RentCanada did not return phone calls from CTV News but an employee who took a message said the company had taken the pages with the private information offline.
Even still, CTV News was able to find caches of the pages.
Privacy lawyer Brian Bowman calls the situation a serious breach.
The Internet doesn’t get amnesia,” he said. “Once the information is out there, of course it’s very difficult if not impossible to have it fully removed.”
The Manitoba government has legislation in the works that would obligate companies to inform people when their information has been breached.
At this time, no such laws exist and none of the people CTV News contacted for this story were made aware of the breach by RentCanada.
