Numerous others have highlighted similar data leaks as well. In January, Eric Johnson, a professor of operations management at the Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business disclosed how he had found on P2P networks. For example, Johnson said he found a 1,718-page document containing Social Security numbers, dates of birth, insurance information, treatment codes and other health care data belonging to about 9,000 patients at a medical testing laboratory.

Such leaks typically occur when a user installs a P2P client such as Kazaa, LimeWire, BearShare, Morpheus or FastTrack on a computer for the purposes of sharing music and other files with others on the network. In many cases, the software is not installed properly and ends up exposing not just the files that the user wants to share, but also every other file on their computers.

A bill that would make it to make software that causes files to be inadvertently shared over a P2P network without a user's knowledge was passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week. The so-called Informed P2P User Act would also require developers to clearly inform users about files that are being made available for searching and sharing, and would mandate that a user agree to the file-sharing first.