I’ve written previously that I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of a national ID, or a national identity database, provided that appropriate steps were taken to limit access and prevent abuse of information that would be collected or linked.
A story in today’s Washington Post does little to make me feel comfortable about the competency of federal bureacrats to satisfy my caveats.
Some lending companies with access to a national database that contains confidential information on tens of millions of student borrowers have repeatedly searched it in ways that violate federal rules, raising alarms about data mining and abuse of privacy, government and university officials said.
The improper searching has grown so pervasive that officials said the Education Department is considering a temporary shutdown of the government-run database to review access policies and tighten security. Some worry that businesses are trolling for marketing data they can use to bombard students with mass mailings or other solicitations.
Students’ Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and sensitive financial information such as loan balances are in the database, which contains 60 million student records and is covered by federal privacy laws. “We are just in shock that student data could be compromised like this,” said Nancy Hoover, director of financial aid at Denison University in Ohio.
Never underestimate the depths to which spammers or mass-marketers will stoop to find new prospects.