CORPUS CHRISTI - The personal information of thousands of students at Texas A&M Corpus Christi was recently lost in a foreign country. A professor vacationing off the coast of Africa took the data with him on a small computer storage device - read more: kristv.com
Sam Gerrans, Senior Technology Consultant at InfoWatch said, "The attitude of the university beggars belief. Its policies do not prevent a member of staff from taking 8000 students' records - including highly sensitive information - with him on holiday. Why not? And while the university mulls over the possibility of taking some sort of disciplinary action against the offender, the rest of us are left with the impression that this attitude is justified because the victims are 'just' students. Actually, they are clients. The people without whom no lecturer has a job.
"We then find that the students affected will have the situation 'explained' to them by the university. Big deal. Sounds like just another lecture to me.
"Three years' free bank monitoring (which would set the university back around 3 million USD) and an unreserved apology signed by the lecturer in question and the university principal would be a more appropriate response."
Sam Gerrans welcomes invitations to write and comment in the English-language press on the information leakage prevention and detection market and related technologies: sam.gerrans@infowatch.com
