How To Remove Documents Stolen And Uploaded To A Website

November 15, 2007 8:38 AM

The problem is that I googled myself and found that a website had a bunch of my private documents, stuff like correspondence between me and colleagues, a manuscript draft, power of attorney, stuff about a failing (ultimately failed) relationship - very confidential stuff.

I have no idea how someone got this information. Or why someone would upload my documents to this website. If you look at the website docstoc.com, it looks like other private documents many other folks are there too.

I have been sick to my stomach knowing that someone has violated me and posted my private life to a document sharing website.

Secondly, how do I get these documents down and wiped from face of the internet as it were?

Thirdly, why does this site have (apparent) right to have and post my documents. Aren't they violating my privacy?

I don't want the whole world to know about my love life, or my career confusion.

posted by anonymous to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

1) First of all, did you ever sign up for totsdoc or any similar site? Is there any possibility that you let a program from totsdoc scan your hard drive for files? If the answer is no, proceed to step two.

2) Track down the documents on that site, and email the admins politely, explaining that documents got posted without your permission and you'd like them removed. My sense is that they'll be happy to comply.

3) Figure out how the hell people got access to your documents. Update your anti-virus software, check file-sharing programs like limewire to make sure they're not sharing your whole hard drive, nad run a spyware scan with spybot. Change your email passwords and the pass for your windows accounts.
posted by chrisamiller at 8:47 AM on November 15, 2007

Did you ever use Kazaa?

People sometimes just share their entire drive. All you have to do with Kazaa is do a search for .doc or keywords like "letter" "dear" etc and comedy gold ensues.

You should check permissions on your folders and make sure that you aren't sharing every thing out with whatever file sharing software you are using.
posted by pieoverdone at 8:49 AM on November 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

Get busy also making sure you are letting the world know about this invasion, like this post, so if anything comes out of the mess to damage you the electronic trail will show you are proactive against it and exactly when.

Knowledge is power but a little bit of dated proof is nice as well.

Good luck
posted by Freedomboy at 9:38 AM on November 15, 2007

Seconding chrisamiller: It isn't uncommon for people who compromise other people's computers to use 3rd party "host stuff" sites like this as a temporary data dump.

When you contact them - which you should, ASAP - you should ask them to remove your documents but preserve any logs they have as to what account uploaded them, on what day, etc. (This article says Docstoc is based in LA, so that's a plus ... if they were in Estonia you'd be a lot worse off)

Can you determine, by looking at the docs, if they could have only come from your local computer - or perhaps could they have come from another person/company email store that has been compromised?

(Taking a cursory look at their site, it looks like their goal is to have "sample documents" for people to reference ... so they may have done some sort of mass Google-scrape and grabbed things on accident)
posted by bhance at 11:24 AM on November 15, 2007

Also, read this: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/21260

"They are running a promotion that gives away an iPod Touch to the user who uploads the most documents each week. That is a great way to create quantity, not quality. I found an iPod winner in Farhan Khan who uploaded over 20,000 documents. It looks like he also just uploaded his hard drive."

Someone may have just uploaded all the documents they could Google in order to win an iPod, and your info somehow got caught in their dragnet ...
posted by bhance at 11:30 AM on November 15, 2007

From the TOS: You represent and warrant that: (i) you own all Submissions posted by you on or through this Site or otherwise have the right to grant the licenses to DOCSTOC set forth in this section, and (ii) the posting of your Submissions on or through this Site does not violate the privacy rights, publicity rights, trademark rights, copyrights, contract rights or any other rights of any person or entity. You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, damages and any other monies owing any person by reason of any Submissions posted by you to or through this Site.
posted by avocet at 1:20 PM on November 15, 2007

Any idea how their search function works? Is Boolean possible. It appears to just search for a single word according to my initial playing around. How to search a first name in combination with a last name?
posted by JimN2TAW at 1:55 PM on November 15, 2007

You should be able to use this form to get your documents out of Google's cache quickly, although you may have to get them removed from docstoc first.
posted by anaelith at 3:51 PM on November 15, 2007 [1 favorite]

I would add the suggestion to do little more googling to see if there is an attorney working on a class-action lawsuit representing people like yourself whose private files got posted without your permission. Someone like that will have the resources to take a lot of the other suggestions posted above (all of which are excellent) and also to take it to the next step - erase their hard disks, punish the people who uploaded the files, and punish the company for creating a website that practically begged for such a violation.
posted by Capri at 4:37 PM on November 15, 2007