Q:

Disclosure of personal data with certificates

Before continuing, please note that I have very little knowledge about or experience with certificates, so this might be completely redundant.  Should this be the case, please let me know so that I can delete this question. 

A few hours or so ago I stumbled upon a question about a problem with certificates that seemed interesting to me, so I started looking into it.  After a while (without figuring out the problem) I went ahead and tried out different data in hopes of reproducing the problem (which is a rather well-known and persistent one). 
For this, I had to get a certificate string, which I found in a question, here on Stack Overflow.  Now, after generating the certificate using the CertificateFactory I noticed that this certificate includes data like "Full name", "Email address", "Company name" etc.,  which now has me wondering if that's unintended disclosure of personal data. 

TL;DR: Certificate strings found on Stack Overflow can be converted to a full certificate, which happens to contain (always, thus far) at least the full name and the email address.  Is that something we need to worry about? 

A:

I think you're referring to the data contained within the certificate.  That data is public and available within the published certificate (signed or not).  You could always use it to generate your own certificate request, but you would have to verify domain ownership to have it signed by a Certificate Authority(CA).  Without a valid signature, browsers will not trust it. 
Here's what Paypal's certificate looks like when you drill down in Firefox (I picked them since they have an EV certificate, and thus fill these fields.  Most certs are domain validated and don't contain the data at all)

Now, if someone were to publish their private key, I'd say it needs removal.