Perfect score for crooks? Princeton Review publishes test-taker personal data
Standardized exam preparatory company The Princeton Review errantly posted the personal information and test scores of more than 100,000 Florida and Virginia students on its website.What type of personal information? Names, birth dates, ethnicities, test scores.
How many victims? One filed contained data on 34,000 public school students in Sarasota, Fla., where the school district was using The Princeton Review to measure student performance. Another exposed file contained the names and birth dates of 74,000 students in the Fairfax County, Va. school district, which had hired the company for a similar reason.
What happened? The company moved its website to a new internet provider in June, which may have caused password protection to be lost and the files to be publicly accessible, The Princeton Review said.
Details: The company is investigating how many people may have accessed the files.
Source:nytimes.com, The New York Times, "Student Files Are Exposed on Web Site," Aug. 19.
