Exploring the ruins of a Toys R Us, discovering a trove of sensitive employee data

When the private equity raiders who took over Toys R Us, saddled it up with debt, extracted $200,000,000 and then crashed it, they took the employee severance fund with them, but that wasn't the final indignity the titans of finance inflicted on the workforce before turning them out on the unemployment line.

Hackaday's Tom Nardi went on an urban exploration adventure through an abandoned Toys R Us, checking out the fixtures and fittings that remained after its inventory had been sold off and the auctioneer had come and gone.

Nardi discovered that -- to their credit -- the company's liquidators had taken care to wipe out historical customer data from Toys R Us (unlike, say, Canada's NCIX), but that the same care was not taken with the employees' own data.

In a room he dubbed "the records room," Nardi and his friends discovered a trove of extremely sensitive employee data: tax forms, photocopied drivers' licenses and Social Security cards, medical records and more.

The amount of personal information left behind for anyone to find was really staggering, especially since these were the company's own employees. We saw the great lengths the company went to protect customer information, so to see how little regard they had for their own people was honestly infuriating.

At the time of this writing, there's still a question of what to do with all of this documentation. My suggestion was to just start a bonfire behind the store and burn it there before even more people run their eyes over it, but reader suggestions are welcome.

Exploring an Abandoned Toys "R" Us [Tom Nardi/Hackaday]

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