When colleges leak sensitive information on students out on the Web, at least they usually know who to blame: It’s their own fault, the fault of a malicious hacker, or some combination thereof.
But the Catawba County school system, in North Carolina, has taken a different tack. School officials are arguing that Google, the wildly popular search engine, is at fault for a recent security snafu that exposed the test scores and Social Security numbers of more than 600 students.
Judith Ray, Catawba’s chief technology officer, told the Hickory Record that one of Google’s Web-scanning robots hacked into a secure server and posted the personal information online. That charge is hogwash, according to Google officials: They say their bots cannot view or capture any information from password-protected sites.
It would seem that any site that could be cached by a search-engine spider is, by definition, part of the public Web. But Catawba officials insist they’ve taken reasonable steps to keep their servers private, and they have filed an injunction accusing Google of trespassing. —Brock Read
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