Purge Your Data

Georgia Tech has suffered a data breach. I hadn’t heard about this until today, when my college age son received a letter from the school letting him know that his personal information (including date of birth and Social Security number) “may have been accessed”.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that “1.3 million current and former students, faculty and staff members” may have been affected. The article also notes the irony that this happened (twice) to the “world renowned university with lauded computer science programs”.

My son has never been a student at Georgia Tech. He did apply a couple of years ago but never enrolled. I can’t think of any reason why his personal information still needs to be in their systems.

It gets worse.

Two letters from Georgia Tech were in my mailbox today – the one addressed to my son, and one addressed to a former resident who I happen to know. (She taught one of my other sons in high school a couple of years ago.) Her letter was sent to where she lived in high school and used her maiden name, so I’m assuming she also applied to Georgia Tech. (I also know that she didn’t attend Georgia Tech.)

We’ve lived in this house for 16 years, so she applied at least that long ago but I’m betting it was closer to 20 years ago. I really can’t imagine that Georgia Tech needs personal information but applicants who didn’t enroll from 20 years ago.

Too many systems are designed with people thinking of how to get data into the system without any thought of purging it when it’s not needed anymore.

Georgia Tech’s enrollment is ~27,000. If you do some basic math, it’s hard to come up with a good reason for there to be 1.3 million people’s personal information in their systems.

Breaches happen, but I’d much rather do crisis management for a breach affecting 100,000 than 1 million.

Purge your data.

Posted in IT