IDs, a speeding ticket, “a several-thousand-euro invoice”. Rogier Beckers is a master student at Innovation Sciences, and he’s seen a variety of personal documents of fellow TU/e people lately. Logging on to the campus network, the public folder containing scans of others is only a click away from his personal folder. Although the scans are only stored temporarily and removed after 24 hours, “I don’t think personal data, including social security numbers, should be made publicly available like this”.

Erik te Nijenhuis works at ICT Services and could not agree more with Beckers. He does say TU/e has “made vast improvements when it comes to protecting the privacy of staff and students” witness the introduction of secure printing earlier this year, for example. “This is absolutely unheard of.”

The ICT employee stresses the problem involved the printers in the MetaForum Student Shop only. Upon installation last February, these have been configured differently than other devices on campus. He explains users have three options when scanning: having the scan emailed to their TU/e account, have it emailed to another email address, or have it saved to the home directory. This home directory should be the user’s personal folder, which is accessible only if the user is logged in. The scans at the Student Shop, however, save the documents to a public area of the network drive -the pool disk- and that’s accessible to others as well.

Nijenhuis says ICT Services has disabled the home directory option on the printers involved. But the change will only take effect after the machine will be reset completely. Although resetting itself takes only several minutes, it’s a complicated process for the printers at MetaForum, because they might just be the most-used MFPs on campus. There are dozens of items in queue at any moment, and that queue is deleted resolutely with every reset.

Still, the MFP was reset last Wednesday afternoon anyway. This should have solved the scanning problem.