The Social Security numbers, home addresses and phone contacts for at least 300 students who applied for admission to Cal Poly Pomona six years ago were unintentionally disclosed online, the university said today.
The applicants were notified this week and urged to contact credit-reporting agencies, school official said.
The personal information, which did not include financial data, “was mistakenly put in a publicly accessible folder on a university server in November 2003,” and Google and other search-engine companies mined the data, according to a statement released by Tim Lynch, senior media communications coordinator for Cal Poly Pomona.
Read more in the L.A. Times.
In December 2008, the college revealed that personal information of 675 former students, including their social security numbers, was accessible on the web. The problem had been detected by a student who was googling his own name.