On April 8, students in the UW-Milwaukee Geography department received an e-mail containing personal information of former UWM students, but the message was removed before most of the recipients opened it.

Judith Kenny, associate professor and undergraduate program chair for the department of geography, sent an e-mail to 97 students in the program. The intended message was to inform the students of their program advisor‘s name. Instead, the wrong file was attached to the email, which contained information of about 33 former geography students.

The information in the e-mail included student names, GPAs and student I.D. numbers. In the past, UWM used social security numbers as student I.D.s This system was common in colleges across the country. UWM stopped using social security numbers several years ago.

After the message was sent out, one student contacted the sender to report the error. Kenny then contacted the help desk. The help desk then called UWM’s IT security. The IT department authorized the removal of the message from Panther Link.

“We can remove anything on Panther Link,“ said Bruce Maas, chief information officer of UWM IT. “We can go in and remove messages. Given the circumstances, it was a mistake. We decided to go ahead with that and we retrieved the message.”

By the time the message was removed, 10 of the 97 individuals who the e-mail was sent to had opened it. Another four students had the message from Panther Link forwarded to another e-mail which was unable to be removed by IT.

Kenny then called the 14 people who had seen the e-mail. Most of them said they had immediately deleted the e-mail after seeing the attachment.

In the event that sensitive information is breached, there are procedures that must be followed in accordance to Wisconsin Statute sec. 134.8. This requires UWM to send a notice to the 33 individuals whose information was sent to students.

A letter was drafted by the UWM legal department which is expected to be sent to the alumni next week.

“Most people said they deleted it, but there is no way we can know that,” Maas said. “The odds of something bad happening are very remote. But, we will let them know that and we will let them know what they can do with regard to credit monitoring and things like that.”

Avoiding problems in the future

The College of Letters and Science is about to begin a project with a service called Identity Finder.

For the last year, UWM has been working to institute a computer program that will be able to access computers networked within L&S and identify where files containing personal information are likely to be located.

This is intended to help faculty and staff to beware of records they have containing personal information.

“Let’s say you have class lists from a number of years ago,“ Maas said. “There are legitimate reasons for why people would keep those. However, we would advise them to delete the student numbers from them because there is no reason to keep them. Human nature being what it is, you file something from six years ago, you may not think to go back and look at it.”

Mass took notice of UW-Stevens Point, when they began to utilize Identity Finder. Maas said the program has been highly successful and decided it could be a solution for security threats at UWM.

College of Letters and Science Dean Richard Meadows decided that the program looked promising and freed up funding to pay for the software.

Maas recognized concerns that may be raised about using this type of software, which will access the files on the computers of faculty and staff members in the College of L&S.

“We won’t be going in and looking at people’s data,“ Maas said. “We will just target things that look like they might be personally identifiable. Then, we will work with the individuals so they can go in and look at it and we can give them suggestions about what to do to clean it up.”

If the program works for UWM’s largest college, Maas intends to expand the use of the program college by college.

“We got feedback from UW-SP that we need to be very sensitive to the concerns of people,” Maas said. “That is why we are going very slowly on this. We want to make sure we do this the right way and people don’t feel like this is some big brother activity.”

The beginning stages of the Identity Finder program are expected to start in a couple of weeks.