The other day, I was searching for the name of a friend on Google, and his personal Curriculum Vitae appeared as the second search result, just after his LinkedIn profile.
It was a plain CV.
And right in the first pieces of information, his phone number, address, and personal email appeared.
So I asked him if he had intentionally uploaded his CV to this website.
“Absolutely not!”
That is what he answered.
In fact, the page where his CV was uploaded was dedicated to static resources, and there was absolutely no way to see the name of the company that had uploaded it, because the domain name shown in the URL was just that of a hosting platform.
So I searched for an ID found in the URL, typed it into Google, and, oh my God, I found dozens of pieces of personal information, CVs, letters, internal documents from other people and associations. And there was still no way to enter the ID on the hosting company’s website to see which company had uploaded the data.
After searching a bit more, I noticed that the internal documents all seemed to belong to the same association.
So what did I do?
I called or sent messages to the other victims to explain the situation and directed them to send an email to the appropriate address of the hosting company for this kind of incident.
It took me more than four hours in total.
It may also be necessary to write an email to the association that allegedly published all this personal information.
Because we live in France / the EU, we have the GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation, and therefore the right to erasure. So we must emphasize this in the emails.
And in France, we have the CNIL, the public authority responsible for protecting the personal data of French citizens.
So if, within two months, we do not receive any response from either the hosting company or the association, they may be sanctioned, especially since they are based in the EU, which makes the process more straightforward.
Also, for any content indexed by Google, we can click on “Remove result,” add the personal information found in the search result, and ask Google to de-index it. It may take a while, though.
PS: It appears that it was a company that shared my Cv with another one during an application process, so be carefull to what you accept especially on the hurry.