11 Hong Kong Schools Found to Expose Details of over 8,500 Students

The Hong Kong Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data has revealed that a lot of schools have inadvertently exposed the personal details of their students by publishing them on their websites.

A recent investigation that targeted 12 secondary schools has uncovered the fact that the details of a total of 8,505 students from 11 educational institutions have been exposed.

In some cases, the information made available online included names, student reference numbers, phone numbers and email addresses.

“Bearing in mind that we have only spent a limited amount of our time in the exercise and our search was only based on some unsophisticated means, the extent of the cyber security problem we have identified is disproportionate,” said Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data Allan Chiang. 

“It reflected a serious lack of vigilance and adequate security measures on the part of the educational institutions in safeguarding personal data.”