However, it’s not only the trading of copyrighted works, such as songs, TV shows and movies that’s attracted the committee’s attention. It seems P2Ps have also been conduits of private data, both personal and corporate.

On April 20 the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sent letters signed by chairman Edolphus Towns, D-N.Y., and ranking Republican Darrell E. Issa of California, to the Justice Department, Federal Trade Commission and The Lime Group seeking information regarding private data that might have been transmitted over file sharing networks.

The Lime Group is the company that develops the LimeWire P2P software.

The committee is also asking what the Obama administration is doing to protect people from those who would take advantage of P2P users accidentally allowing their private data to be downloaded and shared.

When it comes to tax returns, loan applications and credit reports showing up on file sharing networks, the problems are often caused by users not understanding how their P2P software clients are configured. Most P2P software packages create a “shared” directory upon installation. Unless the user specifies otherwise, the “shared” directory functions as the name implies by sharing the contents of the directory with other P2P users.

Simply put, whatever goes into your shared directory ends up being shared. The most obvious way to prevent this is not to put any confidential information in your shared directory.

Evidently too many people aren’t quite clear on this P2P concept. The committee, citing press reports going back to last year, claims everything from more than 150,000 tax returns to the blueprints and avionics for presidential helicopter Marine One ended up on P2P networks.

Other private content that circulated on file-sharing networks include 25,800 student loan applications, 626,000 credit reports and tens of thousands of medical files that also included patients’ names, social security numbers and their afflictions, such as cancer and AIDS.

This isn’t the first time the House committee has looked into P2P. In a letter sent to LimeWire chairman Mark Gorton, Towns and Issa mention how witnesses at a 2007 hearing told the committee they had “easily obtained bank records, health records, military files, tax returns, corporate documents, and other highly sensitive private files via the LimeWire network.”

Furthermore, in their letter to Gorton, Towns and Issa remind the LimeWire chairman that two years ago he had promised significant changes to prevent inadvertent disclosures of personal or confidential info.

However, it appears that nearly two years after your commitment to make significant changes in the software, LimeWire and other P2P providers have not taken adequate steps to address this critical problem,” Towns and Issa wrote.

Unfortunately, the dispersal of private content through P2P networks is more of a user problem than something that needs to be “fixed” by Congress. While software makers might add a few traps to their wares to prevent people from unknowingly sharing private data on the P2P networks, the fact is you just can’t outlaw ineptitude.