Student directories recalled, violate privacy

by Mike Cottrill
Staff Writer

Memo - Web Extra

Due to a computer error, Ohio University campus directories distributed last week included information that some students and faculty had requested be omitted.

The directories were given  to faculty and staff and in addition were made available to students living on South Green through the mailroom in Nelson Commons. They will be recollected from faculty and staff starting today.

South Green residence life staff members have not determined how the directories will be collected from South Green residents but they will have a plan by noon today, said Paula Smolinski, assistant director of residence life on South Green.

After collecting the incorrect directories, administrators will have another set reprinted. Reprinting the approximately 17,000 directories will cost around $33,000, said Hub Burton, associate vice president for university communications and marketing.

The directories included information that at least 50 people had requested to be omitted due to privacy concerns.

About half of the directories were released, said Mike Sostarich, vice president for student affairs.

With many names on the list that were not supposed to be, Sostarich said he was happy the directories had not been released in full force.

"Luckily we had just begun to distribute these," he said. "This is a problem we jumped on very quickly."

Burton said the mistake stemmed from a computer error in a privacy program that should have indicated names that were to be excluded when the directory went to print.

"The names were supposed to have a privacy flag attached to them," he said. "We had that privacy program set up in our office, but when the program moved from our office to Computer Services to University Directories (the company that makes the directories), it was somehow lost. For some reason there was a data error, and the program stopped reading the flags."

Burton said the price of the recall of all the directories was not as important as the protection of student and staff privacy, and the price of a reprint also was not a factor.

"Again safety is the most important thing to look at here," he said. "The reprint will be somewhat costly, but I feel confident in saying that it is worth that price tag to make everyone feel safe in this process."

With the mistake caught relatively quickly, Sostarich called for a complete recall of the directories. In an e-mail sent to all OU faculty and staff on Nov. 14, he addressed the error and gave options for faculty to return the directories.

"We have a system set up where staff members just need to put the directories in their mailboxes and we"ll pick them back up," he said.

While the directories are recalled, new ones will be made as quickly as possible.  Burton said this will be a tough task, but can be done in three or four weeks.

"This will be hard because of the upcoming holiday break," Burton said. "The first step right now though is just fixing what went wrong."

Today is the last day of classes, and finals begin on Wednesday.

The computer program had been based on a list of names of the 50 people who had asked for confidentiality and was supposed to automatically remove them from the list before it could be printed. As OU plans to prepare new directories, Burton said they will keep a much more watchful eye on the process.

"When we do this again, you can be sure that we will be checking and double checking the database for that confidentiality flag," Burton said. "It is extremely important to protect the privacy of those who want to be left off of the list, and that is our primary responsibility."

As Burton's office prepares the new directories, he said he hopes to retrieve all of the misprinted ones as a show of good faith to those who wanted privacy.

"We hope to get all of the new ones out, and the old ones back so we can put this behind us," Burton said. "We have already been in touch with most of the people on the list and they have been very understanding about the matter. We might not get every directory, but I think our effort is a show of how we want to fix this mistake."