By Jen Gerson
The list of confidential student information that went missing from the Student Financial Assistance office has been found and the university is changing the way it deals with private information as a result of the incident.
“We learned some lessons from that episode and we will not have such hand written or typed lists available anymore. [Scholarship lists will] be done in a way that people would not be able to have access to it if it’s lost. It will be [kept] on computers,” said Ryerson President Claude Lajeunesse.
On Sept. 8, the names, contact information and Social Insurance Numbers of 250 students who had won the Queen Elizabeth II Aiming for the Top scholarship were misplaced.
Some students feared that their information could put them at risk of identity theft. On Sept. 23, the scholarship winners were sent a brief e-mail informing them that the information had been returned to the financial aid office.
Derek Isber, RyeSAC’s vice president finance, found the list. He was painting banners in POD 60 when he saw the scholarship register. He called University Advancement but got no response. “They sat in my office for a couple of days,” he said.
After an article in The Eyeopener last week publicized the security leak, an employee at the advancement office came down to RyeSAC to talk about George’s hot dog bursaries.
“I said, ‘Here’s the list of numbers, I don’t want them and I don’t want to see them anymore,’ ” Isber said. He’s not the only one who wants to put the incident behind him.
“I’m not very pleased by what happened, but, on the other hand, we now know this was not in the hands of people who would misuse it and we’ve learned our lessons from it,” Lajeunesse said.
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