Thousands of people have reportedly been put at risk by the Village of Tinley Park.  According to the SouthTown Star:

The Social Security, bank account and driver’s license numbers of anyone who has given his or her personal information to the Village of Tinley Park in the last 10 to 15 years may have been on a back-up computer tape the village lost in June.

About 19,000 residents should be getting letters in the mail about the incident, village manager Scott Niehaus said. That’s how many residents likely are affected, Niehaus said, adding that the risk that anyone could access the information on the tape is slim. About 1,400 current, former and retired village employees also should be getting a notice, Niehaus said. By law, vendors don’t have to be notified, he said.

No one suspects foul play.  According to village officials in Tinley Park, this appears to be an accident.

As our ability to store vast amounts of information on increasingly small media, risk for this type of “accident” only increases.  Do you wear a flash drive around your neck?  Personally, I don’t favor storage devices as fashion statements, but I’ve seen enough people wearing them.  How easy they are to misplace, sometimes.

Too bad for just about everyone in Tinley.