UVA students, faculty and staff, excluding the health system, are beginning the academic year with new ID cards, and a conundrum.
 Brad Sayler is concerned that UVA is now taking driver’s license info for the new IDs—another bit of personal data that could be compromised. |
The cards, according to Shirley Payne, director for security coordination and policy, are part of an overall initiative by the University to discontinue the usage of social security numbers. In place of these are University ID numbers, created after the bar codes on the backs of driver’s licenses are scanned (unless a passport or military ID is presented as a form of identification). This process, says Payne, "adds assurance that we are giving a card to the right person."
The conundrum is this: While the elimination of social security numbers takes care of one personal-identity security concern, the inclusion of driver’s license numbers into the University database introduces another. And UVA has had some major breaches in its recent past. It came to light in April that hackers accessed personal info, including social security numbers, of 5,735 current and former UVA faculty members. Last October, UVA’s Student Financial Services inadvertently sent 632 e-mails containing students’ personal info and social security numbers to the wrong students.
Not surprisingly, Payne says the driver’s license numbers will be kept confidential. But that doesn’t appease Brad Sayler, who’s worked for 15 years doing computer support for the civil engineering department. The University has "taken two steps forward and one step back," in Sayler’s opinion. "The University’s track record clearly indicates that they don’t have the ability to stop all hack attempts," he says.
But there’s more to Sayler’s beef than concerns about security. "They’re not telling that they’re adding [driver’s license numbers] to the database," he says. "That’s what’s so disconcerting about the whole thing." He doesn’t understand why the University needs to store the numbers. "Why can’t they just look at the driver’s license?" Sayler wonders.
And there’s something else the University isn’t publicizing: the fact that upon an individual’s request, the scanned information will be removed from the database. After hearing second-hand from an ITC representative that this was possible, Sayler himself returned to Sponsors Hall, where the ID cards are distributed, and had his information removed. Still, he says, "there’s no way of verifying that it actually was taken off."
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