Alberta school board loses sensitive flash drive

A USB stick containing the personal information of thousands of employees of Alberta's Edmonton Public School Board has gone missing.

How many victims? 7,000.

What type of personal information? Resumes, employment records and possibly banking data.

What happened? A school board computer technician working in the human resources department lost the flash drive on March 22.

Details: School board staff violated policy by retaining too much data for too long and failing to keep a record of the information downloaded to the USB drive, said Frank Work, Alberta's privacy commissioner.

Quote: "According to school board policy, you're not supposed to use an unencrypted stick," Work said. "They did.”

What was the response? The school board has sent notification letters to affected individuals. The board has spent thousands of dollars to respond to the incident.

Source: CBC News, “School board loses memory stick with employee data,” April 13, 2011.