Levin College of Law

On May 14, 2012, the University’s Privacy Office was notified of a privacy breach involving your personal information. The purpose of this letter is to notify you of this incident, describe the steps taken to investigate it, describe the steps being taken to protect against its reoccurrence, and provide you with information that might be useful to you if you wish to take additional protective steps.

On May 13, 2012, the Levin College of Law received a report that a former student found social security numbers through the college website. The University of Florida investigation discovered that in the early 2000s, the Levin College of Law (“College”) Office of Admissions purchased a software program, whereby law school applicants admitted to the College could search for a possible roommate among other law school admittees. The College added the program to its website for this purpose. To ensure only College admittees could access the matching list database, the software required the user’s Social Security Number (SSN). The program stored social security numbers in an administrative folder created by the software; neither this folder nor its contents would be visible to someone using the software or the database. While the College stopped using the software to support the matching program in the mid 2000s, the administrative folders and their contents remained on the College’s unlinked web pages and were stored on UF servers. Thereafter, the data, like all web information, has been searchable, and if located, stored in caches maintained by Google.

On Monday, May 14, 2012, the College removed the problematic web pages to make them inaccessible on the UF servers. On repeated occasions since that date, the College, the UF Privacy Office, and the UF Office of the General Counsel have each requested that Google remove the files where the SSNs were cached; as of June 19, Google removed the files. On Saturday June 9th, the LCOL migrated its entire web presence to new software, which enables us to now verify that the web server space the College is allotted will not have any restricted private data.

 

Documents

• Answers to Commonly Asked Questions (Updated 6/26/2012)
• Copy of letter by UF officials (PDF, 98 KB)
• Copy of letter by the Dean of the Levin College of Law (PDF, 90 KB)
• Identity Theft Brochure (PDF, 1.08 MB)