Friday, October 21, 2005

Western students' personal data, including SINs, posted on Internet

Thanks to David Canton for e-mailing me about this story out of the University of Western Ontario: It appears that someone posted a listing of graduate students who had applied for scholarships on a web server. The information included names, social insurance numbers and whether they had been successful in previous competitions. The university has sent letters to the thousand affected students, informing them that the info was online and had been taken down. In the meantime, it had been indexed (and presumably cached) by Google and viewed at least fourteen times. Concerned students are being told to place a fraud alert on their credit files. See London Free Press - City & Region - Students' personal data posted on Internet in error. Also, check out David Canton's post: eLegal Canton: UWO student personal data posted on Internet.

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