Tuesday, December 12, 2006
PRIVACY RIGHTS UNDER SIEGE IN SOUTH CAROLINA
Greenville Online reports that State Senator "David Thomas is considering filing a class action lawsuit against Greenville County Schools if the district doesn't resolve a security breach he said could have resulted in computers being sold on eBay containing Social Security numbers of thousands of students."
And the Associated Press reports, "The University of California, Los Angeles alerted about 800,000 current and former students, faculty and staff on Tuesday that their names and certain personal information were exposed after a hacker broke into a campus computer system." But, it appears that Social Security Numbers and names were not linked in the data base.
In the meantime, personal information, including Social Security Numbers and the birth dates of children, is available online from the Family Courts of South Carolina. And one does not have to hire a hacker or wrestle a State Senator to get it. Yet no one is taking steps either to protect this information from public scrutiny or to limit access to it.
