Fergie's Tech Blog

Privacy Data of North Carolina Students Available via Google Search

Rachel Rosemarin writes on Forbes.com:

How thorough are Google's omnipresent, Web-crawling robots? Good enough to find private records for hundreds of North Carolina public school students.

The Social Security numbers and test scores of 619 students at public schools in Catawba County, N.C., were available online via Google's search engine until Friday, when the company complied with a local court order to delete all information about that county's board of education from its servers.

Experts on search engine indexing technology insist that Google's Web robots could not have “hacked” into the school site--instead, several possible scenarios have been suggested. Barry Schwartz, executive editor of Search Engine Roundtable says that because Google could not have generated the site's password by itself, someone else must have made the student information available to the search engine.

posted by Fergie @ 6/26/2006 10:50:00 AM