Teacher Fails Students

An article I read today on FOX 4 TV in Kansas City shows that at least one educational system is failing their students, but not in the way you would expect. You pay good money to get an education and you would think the school you attend should take every precaution to keep your personal information safe. Not so with one college teacher at least.

In Manhattan, Kansas, one teacher had his backpack stolen from his vehicle parked outside a home. No biggie, right? Well, it just so happens that he had the papers of 86 students and their Social Security numbers in that backpack. These were his students from Fall of 2007 to Summer of 2008. I can understand why a teacher would have papers with him if he were taking them home to grade. But papers from students a year ago? And if he was taking them home to grade, why didn't he take them in the house? And why did he have the students SSN's? Is that required to turn in a paper? Something is wrong with that.

This teacher deserves a failing grade for failing his students. Now they are all exposed to the possibility of identity theft and have to monitor their credit (which they should anyway) and identities for the next few years. Hopefully, the burden of expense will fall on the university and not the students.

Click here to read the full article.

This is similar to an incident that happened to me a few years ago. The financial institution handling my student loan had a server stolen from their facility. Just my luck, my personal information was on that server, and at least the bank knew that. In an effort to apologize, the bank was at least nice enough to foot the bill for credit and identity monitoring for the next year for myself and all the other thousands of students that had their information on that server.

Consider these two incidents for a moment. One occurred as theft from a car (a random smash and grab from the sounds of it), and the other occurred at a well-known financial institution. How exactly someone walks off with a server from a data center is beyond me. Where's the security? But to the point, both incidents bring to light the fact that your identity is at risk in many different ways, and unfortunately most often beyond your control. You can be as cautious as humanly possible about your personal information and do everything within your means to prevent someone from stealing your identity, yet some moron is allowed to walk off campus or out of a bank with your personal information in tow and you're put at risk.

Now, with an identity theft protection and recovery solution in place from Merchants Information Solutions, I feel a little more assured that at least if something like this should happen to me again and resulted in some devastating financial activities, I'd be able to clean it up. But I wonder what many other people are doing about this type of crisis? What kind of plan do you have in place for such incidents? Leave a comment and let me know.