Catawba County Schools Plays “Blame Game”
The Catawba County Schools is playing the blame game rather than owning up to operator error on behalf of their own employees. The school district somehow convinved a judge to issue an injunction against Google for allegedly posting names, social security numbers and grades of 619 students.
They school district claims that Google somehow trespassed on their server and made information publicly available. There is very little information about this incident being publicly released, however the following statement really caught my attention:
“One of the students on the list had a presence on the Web,” she said. “In Google’s 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.”
Based on reading the statement by the district I can only surmise that they have incompetent system administrators working on their web server. It is common knowledge by those in the industry that if information is posted on a publicly accessible web site then it can be spidered and indexed by Google. If the information is properly protected then there is no way for Google’s spider to crawl the documents, therefore they will not be included in their index.
Sadly, it appears that nobody is willing to own up and tell the school district that they made a mistake. Taxpayer dollars will be wasted on a baseless lawsuit that could have been avoided if 1) the district hired competent system administrators and 2) the employees properly briefed their supervisors on their own mistakes.