More on New York Univ. and ongoing website privacy woes [priv]

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 21:57:04 -0500
From: Brian Ristuccia <brian () ristuccia com>
To: declan () well com
Subject: Personal Student Information on NYU Website (AGAIN!)

(Declan, please feel free to post this message to your politech mailing list
if you find it may interest the subscribers).

On January 20, there was a politech posting about the personal information
about over 1800 NYU students being posted on NYU's public website for over
two years. Well, it turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. The NYU
student-run Washington Square News is reporting on additional privacy
incidents where personal information about thousands of students, alumni,
and faculty has been out in the open in several different places on NYU's
public website. See
http://www.washingtonsquarenews.com/news/campus/6627.html

  Last Friday, a second site that listed the personal information of at
  least 2,100 students, alumni and professors was taken off-line. [...]
  McMillan said that NYU has in fact been searching over the past few weeks
  for sensitive data hosted on NYU's server, and the university already shut
  down between three and six sites.

There's also an interesting editorial titled "NYU, Admit your mistake" at
http://www.washingtonsquarenews.com/opinion/editorial/6632.html which
criticizes the university's lack of candor in the face of these sorts of
problems. The previous issue with the 1800+ intermural athletes is a great
example: NYU's notification came only after much delay and was far from
forthright in explaining what had happened.

For some background information, see:

http://politechbot.com/pipermail/politech/2004-January/000328.html
http://osiris.978.org/~brianr/nyu-publication/

--
Brian Ristuccia
brian () ristuccia com

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