Saturday, September 17, 2005

Incident: U of Miami students' Social Security Numbers posted online for past three years

A Miami TV station is reporting that personal information, including SSNs, has been posted on the internet for the last three years. It appears that a professor placed a standard grade report on an internet-accessible computer, which was indexed by a search engine and found by a former student who was googling him/herself. See: Students' Social Security Numbers Posted Online - Yahoo! News.

Having one's embarassing English 101 mark put online is probably bad enough, but incidents such as this really highlight why universities should not use social security numbers (or social insurance numbers, in Canada) as student identifiers.

No comments: