If you have been reading this blog for a while, you might remember me mentioning a site called CalJOBS. This is the site that the government strongly encourages people to sign up for when they first apply for Unemployment Insurance. This is the job site that, so far, has produced the least amount of jobs for me to apply for.
Thanks to “Savage”, a friend who left me a comment on this blog, I became aware of another small, teeny, tiny problem with CalJOBS.
Check this out. The government has shut down the CalJOBS website because “A glitch discovered on Cal Jobs website could be at risk for identity theft.” Apparently, “a man” was on CalJOBS, and he accidently came across this “glitch” that, oops!, allowed him to view other people’s information through the CalJOBS site. Seems the state of California shut down the site after that.
Here’s a fun quote from the article: “While there’s no evidence that anyone has had their identity stolen, consumer counselors say that it’s a good idea to look over your credit report, just in case.” Doesn’t that just make you feel all safe and secure? Unemployed people desperately seeking financial help from the US Government don’t have enough problems, it seems. No, we also have to worry about if some nefarious person decided to use the private information they “accidently” found on this site to ruin our credit ratings, or, potentially steal our identities, in addition to every other worry we all are facing.
I went to the CalJOBS website today, just to see if it was still down. It was. There is no indication about when, or if, it will return. It is just “temporarily unavailable” because “of a few isolated cases of unauthorized access to posted résumé information.”
The CalJOBS site claims that “Such access was available to a limited number of résumé postings and did not compromise confidential information contained in the system such as Social Security numbers.” So, in other words, if you happened to put your resume on CalJOBS, don’t worry, they didn’t accidently give out your social security number. Just your name, home address, telephone number, cell phone number, and a list of places you used to work at. Nothing important, really. Not anything that could cause you harm.
Right now, I am very glad that I never got around to posting a resume on CalJOBS. I might have posted one, if, you know, I found any job listings there that I was both qualified for and interested in, but that didn’t happen. I’m still very nervous, though, after hearing this news. If the state run job listing website was unwittingly giving random strangers access to people’s personal information, and everybody who signed up there also had to go online to sign up for Unemployment Insurance….. how do I know that some stranger doesn’t have all my personal information right now?
Thanks, State of California, for being incompetent, and giving me more to stress out about!
Tags: CalJobs, Unemployment Insurance
As far as I know in order to receive unemployment check must list your resume on caljobs website. Do you think perhaps thats why your checks are delayed?
Lal,
It was my understanding that when I applied for Unemployment Insurance that I had to “sign up” for CalJOBS. That appeared right on the online form I used to apply to Unemployment Insurance. Nothing was said about actually putting a resume on there. My guess is what was delaying the checks was that the EDD elected to wait so long to schedule the “telephone interview”, because the checks started arriving after that was done. This is only a guess, however.