The Herald Tribune (Sarasota’s newspaper) recently reported that slightly more than 88% of 38,000 students that attend school in their district had private and personal information placed on the Internet for approximately two months.

Princeton Review was contracted by the school district to maintain the Sarasota County Planning Tools database to track student grades and help teachers develop tests.  The information contained student ID numbers, which often were Social Security Numbers. It also contained birthdates, names, test scores, disabilities, ethnicity and sex.  It was a simple matter to find this information by using a search engine.  The Princeton Review says the error occurred when they switched Internet Service Providers.

More than the students of Sarasota were affected by this snafu.  Almost 74,000 students of Fairfax, VA had their information posted on the web as well.  The company that was hired to measure the students’ performances nearly cost them their identities.  Hackers would have been dancing on the rooftops at finding all of this information on students, because it takes the average person three months to find out something is wrong.  But students don’t have a reason to check their credit ratings, so it could be years before they find out their credit is shot even before they applied for it.

The Princeton Review is definitely at fault here.  Their website has been compromised, and their security system laid wide open.  Over 100,000 student had their private information out on the net for more than 60 days.  What’s worse, anything posted on the Internet generally stays there, no matter if it is deleted.  Somewhere, someplace you can be sure that information has been cached and is just sitting on a server, ready to be accessed again.

The school board needs to take some of the blame as well.  This huge database of private information wouldn’t be needed if they didn’t rely so heavily on standardized tests as part of the educational process.  Teachers used to log information into grade books.  What happened to that approach?  Is it really necessary to have so much information about students?  Well, the school board is going to have to make some harsh decisions when they review what happened with Princeton Review.

I say they should be more concerned with protecting personal information than amassing it on some site to study student performances.  It is convenient for students, teachers and parents to have access to the info, but is it worth the risk of information theft?  When I went to school, we receive progress reports and report cards that told me and my parents just how well I was doing, and they worked just fine.

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