��������

Your personal information may be at risk if you're a Home Depot customer. According to the Consumerist on Friday, the Atlanta-based retail chain has been storing massive amounts of customer data on unencrypted, publicly available web pages, leaving it open to hackers and identity thieves. Some customers' files were even findable through search engines like Google. Up to 8,000 shoppers' personal information was stored in vulnerable Excel documents, which included some customers' photos and past purchases. The leak did not compromise any financial data, such as credit or debit card numbers and bank account information. How did some consumers' information end up on the retail chain's online spreadsheets? Each affected person had filed a complaint with Home Depot's MyInstall service - a method of communication that helps customers connect with the store's installers. Each entry included the type of product the customer purchased and the reason for the complaint. The files have been removed from the home improvement company's site, but it's unclear how long they were accessible. “The information was out there, and as hard as it would have been for anyone to find, it shouldn’t have been ," Home Depot said in a statement to the Consumerist. "This was an inadvertent human error that we addressed as soon as we discovered it. Although the data was low-risk and not the type of information commonly used for fraud or identity theft, we take the matter very seriously.�� Last month, Home Depot was ordered to pay at least $179 million in damages over a 2014 security breach. The incident affected the credit card data of 56 million people. A report from Bitdefender in March found that 34 percent of US-based companies experienced some type of online security breach last year, many of which went unreported.