POMONA, Calif. -- Cal Poly Pomona officials are notifying 675 student applicants from 2001 that there was a breach of confidentiality involving their personal data, which was inadvertently accessed by a former student, the university announced Thursday.
The information includes names, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers, but no financial data, said Uyen Mai of the school's public affairs office.
"We sincerely regret that this data was not secure," Debra Brum, Cal Poly's vice president for Instructional and Information Technology, said in a statement.
"Everyone at the university plays a role in protecting personal information, and we take this responsibility very seriously," Brum said.
On Nov. 17, a former student notified the university that he had accessed an Excel file containing his personal information, Mai said.
The former student said he came across the file while searching Google for information about himself, Mai said.
The file contained the personal information of applicants from 2001, and was stored in an old server that was scheduled for replacement in 2009, Mai said. The university immediately secured the file and removed the data.
The school's Information Security Office determined that the breach was unintentional, and that the file mistakenly had been placed in a publicly accessible folder, Mai said.
