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Universities Show Little Control Over Personal Data
David Utter
Staff Writer
2008-06-16
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Columbia and the University of Florida are two of the latest schools with personally identifiable information about their students posted by the thousands online.
 | | Universities Show Little Control Over Personal Data |  |
When the NCAA dings a school over athletic shenanigans, the dreaded phrase "lack of institutional control" comes up in the most serious of cases. It's an appropriate statement when considering how details about Florida and Columbia students hit the Internet, and stayed there for months.
The situations, reported on CyberInsecure.com, seem to bode a little better for the Florida Gators. A project by two students to create a tutoring database exposed over 11,300 students to potential snoopers within the school.
"The student employees posted the information online so that they could work with it from remote locations, but they did not install security measures to keep others from accessing it as well," Joe Glover, interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said in a statement.
At Columbia, over 5,000 students had their information posted to a "Google-hosted web site" for 16 months. The school blamed a former, unnamed student for doing this in February 2007. The school claims the posting of students' housing information happened unintentionally.
That may be the case, but being posted at all for months and months in a publicly accessible way should never have happened. We suspect if any of either university's law school graduates are impacted, they may be willing to give their new skills a workout in court over these breaches.
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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