How Cornell Plans To Purge Campus Computers of Personal Data

and so forth writes "Cornell lost a laptop last year with SSNs. Now, they've mandated scanning every computer at the University for the following items: social security numbers; credit card numbers; driver's license numbers; bank account numbers; and protected health information, as defined by HIPAA. The main tools are Identityfinder (commercial software for Windows and Mac), spider (Cornell software for Windows from 2008) and Find_SSN (python script from Virginia Tech). The effort raises both technical questions (false positives, anyone?) and practical issues (should I trust closed source software to do this?). Have other Universities succeeded at removing confidential data? Success, here, should probably be gauged in terms of diminished legal liability after the attempted clean up has been completed." Note: this program affects the computers of university employees and offices, rather than students' personal machines.

Comments

Ohio State University

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohio State relies on their institutional data policy and Disclosure or Exposure of Personal Information policy. Essentially, any protected information has to be kept on encrypted devices. That worked fairly well, except once they had all their computers encrypted they quit paying the license fees to PGP. They didn't know the software, which they thought was only pre-boot authentication, phoned home and had a DRM time-bomb in it to automatically drop everything Windows was doing, and spend a couple hours decrypting the whole drive after a certain date if the subscription wasn't renewed. I'd be pretty weary of trusting that kind of task to proprietary software, especially if it requires a subscription like ours did. Posted AC for obvious reasons. If it's closed source, you never know what kind of trick the vendor might be able to pull on you.