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News Privacy breach on Mercyhurst Web site reveals student GPAs, award nominations
By Joshua Wilwohl Editor-in-chief The prize for seniors getting nominated for one of Mercyhurst College's four top awards was to get their academic information posted on the Internet. Any individual looking to see who was nominated for senior awards could easily access the records of 55 nominees that included their GPA and the names of the nominators. The site, https://secure.mercyhurst.edu/senior_awards/, listed students by name under the individual award categories. The awards include the Carpe Diem Award, Frank Barry Leadership Award, Sr. Carolyn Herrmann Service Award, and Catherine McAuley Adult Student Award. The site, which had been up since March 28, was blocked to public access on April 13 at 1:24 p.m., said Sheila Coon, the college’s director of marketing. The students' records were PDF files found on an unsecured server on the Mercyhurst Web site. The files were discovered after a student searched "senior awards – Mercyhurst" on Google. Mercyhurst College Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs Meredith Schultz said Google created cached pages of the site after gathering the information. A cached page, according to Googleguide.com, is when, “Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and caches (stores) that version as a back-up.” In a statement released by the college, initial reports suggest Google followed links to the site from the Google toolbar. Schultz said the college placed a request to Google on April 13 to take those pages off their search engine. She said the turn around time is usually 24 to 48 hours. Senior Marissa Starin, one of the students nominated for an award, said she wants her private information secured and not for everyone to see. "I don’t think anyone else should have access to this, and only those who are picking this award need access," she said. "I think this is a personal thing and I don’t think the people who nominated you were expecting you to find out." Coon said the college launched the site in an effort to conserve paper. "We did this in an effort to go green," said Coon. "It was so the committee would not have to go through and review papers.” Coon said in the past, the senior awards committee would receive a lot of paperwork related to the nominees, and the Web site was a way to work on conservation. The college issued a statement on April 13 explaining the error. "Upon learning early Sunday afternoon that information about senior awards nominees was publicly accessible on the Web, the Mercyhurst College Office of Marketing and Public Relations took immediate action to have the site removed," reads the statement. "At marketing's request, the Web administrator removed the site on the www.mercyhurst.edu Web where the Office of Academic Affairs had requested that nomination forms and the list of nominated seniors' PDFs for the different awards be posted. This site was developed only for nominating committee access. It was not intended that this information be made public." Coon said the college’s information technology department is working to create a password secured site for the information. "We had a meeting with IT and those types of security measures (password protection) will be in place on the site," she said. Coon said no financial information or personal Web Advisor information was made available to the public on the site. She said letters were sent to all seniors affected by the privacy breach. Schultz apologizes for any inconvenience. “We’re doing the best as possible to undo (this),” she said. “We want to protect students as much as we can.”
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