Editorial: Student ID Problem

As new technology becomes a part of everday life, the customs and laws governing its use always lag behind. Cellular phones come to mind.

Though just about everyone has had one for quite a few years now, it’s only recently that you can sit through an entire class without hearing a cell phone go off. Why? It took time for courtesy to catch up with technology.

Cell phones, of course, don’t really cause that much harm. A far more damaging technology is the Internet, which remains a Wild West more than a decade after its popular use began. We are still in the process of figuring out how to control the online world and the biggest risks are still fraud and identification theft.

As the Internet is mostly a realm beyond governmental control, it has fallen to the free market, with online companies like AOL and MSN to keep users safe. Though the federal government can enforce such things as copyright law, state institutions can do much more than that and some have not been as diligent as they should be.

Fresno State, and for that matter the entire CSU system, has left its students wide open for identity theft, despite its best efforts to protect us.

Students’ social security numbers (the gateway to any other personal information a skilled hacker might want) are stored on Fresno State Web sites and are sometimes used to pull up information when they cannot remember their student ID numbers. Not all students are informed on how to take the simple steps to protect themselves, the online system Fresno State uses is flimsy, and hackers know that university Web sites are easy pickings.

There is no doubt Fresno State administration has addressed this issue, but when some progress is made on any front, the job seems to be dropped.

Three years ago the campus switched from primarily using students’ social security numbers to using student identification numbers. Students’ social security numbers are still in use in order to access student information. However, as students can access their accounts using these instead of their new student numbers.

If the purpose of creating new student numbers was to protect students’ social security numbers, then the job is not finished. Campus IT personnel should establish the new student identification number as the only way to access an account, so that a user never uses, or has the chance to come in contact with, a social security number.

Fresno State must also keep students informed of even the most seemingly trivial online matters that threaten their security. For instance, on the “My Fresno State” site, one must click on “sign out” to ensure that the account is indeed signed out of. On most Web sites, one only has to close the window to log out, but if that convention is followed on “My Fresno State,” students risk their class registration and personal information being available to the next user of the same computer.

Fresno State should change the “My Fresno State” site so that simply closing the window signs the user out, just like the campus e-mail site.

Nearly everything the government puts out for public use is made so the dumbest person can use it and not get it wrong. Fresno State Web sites should be fashioned with that same philosophy in mind.

University Web sites are high on hackers’ hit lists, and Fresno State has been lucky so far not to have had a major security breach. In 2005 alone, schools such as Boston College, Colorado, Michigan State, Purdue, Stanford, and USC had their systems hacked into. In addition to security breaches on four CSU campuses this year, the Chancellor’s Office itself fell victim to hackers in August.

At this rate it’s a matter of when, not if, our personal information will be compromised. Fresno State, the CSU system and all universities have the opportunity to lead the way in protecting its students’ and its customers’ identities online, to control the online world where the biggest risks are still fraud and identification theft.