Google pulls student Social Security numbers

Found on CNet News on Tuesday, 27 June 2006
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A North Carolina public school district went to court to get Google to remove Social Security numbers and test scores for more than 600 students after the information was exposed on the Web, according to article in the Winston-Salem Journal online.

Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch, got more information from the school district's chief technology officer, Judith Ray, who said that Google somehow bypassed the login information. "We acted so aggressively with Google because, until the media got involved, we could not get beyond an operator at Google," she said.

"Our crawler does not have the ability to enter passwords. The fact that the information was in our index indicates that the documents were not password protected at the time when we crawled the site," Google said in a statement on Monday.

Google, the big hacker. This whole case proves that nobody at the school has the slightest idea of how the Internet works. The "login" probably was some Javascript and the "bypassing" was done by following a link.