The administration intentionally shut down Georgetown’s e-mail system Wednesday night after discovering that an e-mail containing private information about three students had been accidentally sent to 2,900 graduate students.
According to University Registrar John Q. Pierce, the Department of Public Safety intended to send a broadcast e-mail regarding a break-in at a student residence over the weekend. However, the document that was sent contained information that was not intended for students about several other incidents over the weekend.
Before being sent to students, a broadcast e-mail is usually read, edited and retyped by several people within the department that is sending it. The document is then given to the registrar’s office, where it is sent without being read again, Pierce said.
However, yesterday’s e-mail was sent without editing, causing confidential information to be received by graduate students before administrators realized the mistake and shut down GUMail so undergraduates did not have the opportunity to read the message.
The e-mail was sent by the Registrar’s office yesterday afternoon. According to Vice President for Student Affairs Juan Gonzalez, administrators who received the message notified him about its content just before 5:00 p.m.
Gonzalez said that he immediately contacted the three students mentioned by name in the e-mail to warn them about the dissemination of their personal information and to apologize. He said that at 5:25 p.m. he contacted Beth Ann Bergsmark, director of Academic and Information Technology Services, and told her to shut down the e-mail system.
After discovering that only graduate students were able to read the e-mail before service was suspended, Gonzalez met with other high-level administrators and determined that the message should be purged from all students’ mailboxes in order to “preserve the dignity of the students mentioned in the e-mail.”
The purge, a process that takes between four and eight hours, began at 9:00 p.m. Bergsmark said that University Information Systems mechanically replaced the e-mail received by graduate students with a blank message, although the subject line of the e-mail was unchanged. The message was removed from all undergraduate mailboxes.
The removal process was completed at about 8:00 a.m. Wednesday morning and all blocked e-mails were delivered.
Bergsmark stated that the purging process was done automatically by a computer program, assuring student privacy. “The length of the outage showed the difficulty of the process,” she said. “Student privacy is secure.”
Some e-mails were unable to be removed, however, due to students who have their mail forwarded from their Georgetown account to an external account.
Although the University has never before had to suspend e-mail service due to an error of this kind, Gonzalez stated that the outage was in the best interest of the students.
“This was an unfortunate issue and we took extraordinary steps. Our immediate concern was to care for the three students mentioned in the e-mail,” Gonzalez said.
Pierce noted that the University will re-examine its system for editing broadcast e-mails in order to avoid future incidents.
