Catawba County Schools in North Carolina obtained an injunction to remove private data containing names, social security numbers and test scores of 619 students from Google Index as it was available to find and read online until late Friday before the pages were apparently removed.

Catawba County Schools chief technology officer Judith Ray the information was stored in the system’s DocuShare server, which required a username and password to access. She said that one of the students on the list had a presence on the Web. Googles web spider latched onto her name in this document.

"One of the students on the list had a presence on the Web," she said. "In Googles effort to get information on her, one of its spiders latched onto her name in this document. We were not aware that password-protected sites are set up like that. To our knowledge, Google could only cache unsecure information that did not require a password or username."

In a statement, Google said its crawler does not have the ability to enter passwords. The students personal information was discovered last week when a relative of one of the students performed a Google search.

This could have been avoided if they had Robot.txt in its web directory or by placing NOARCHIVE, NOCACHE, NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW in the Meta tags of each page.


Send to a friend | Permalink | Del.icio.us | Go To Top
Translate: