LINCOLN -- The Nebraska State Treasurer has removed a list of individual University of Nebraska transactions from its web site, Nebraskaspending.gov, because of concerns about student confidentiality.
Agency spokesman Jason Walters said the 2008-09 listing inadvertently included financial aid and loan payments to students, although the payments were not identified as financial aid.
Student financial information is confidential.
Walters said all NU transactions were removed because of the difficulty of combing through more than 300,000 transactions to determine which related to student financial aid.
The web site had been operating slowly Monday because of unusually heavy traffic, Walters said. .
Earlier story:
LINCOLN (AP) — The state treasurer's office and the University of Nebraska are discussing how to remove private financial aid and loan information about thousands of NU students from a treasurer's website.
The special website lists more than 1.75 million payments the Nebraska government made in fiscal 2008-09.
Among them are about 300,000 payments from the university system, and in that data are student names and the amount of refunds of loans, scholarships and/or financial aid reimbursements.
Student Jordan Sis said he's not happy that information about a 2009 refund has been posted.
“I am a little frightened because my personal information is so easily accessible online,” Sis told the Lincoln Journal Star. “It is not anyone else's business about how much money is refunded back to me. I want this information taken off the Internet, because it shouldn't be there.”
The university asked that the information be removed, but state Treasurer Shane Osborn said he doesn't have enough people or other resources to do so.
“We don't want to put anything up that is confidential, but the cat is out of the bag,” Osborn said. “The information has been up for a long time now, and the university was given several chances to scrub the data.”
Craig Munier, director of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Office of Scholarship and Financial Aid, said the student information was not supposed to be made public.
“This issue raises an interesting conflict between transparency and an individual's right to privacy,” he said.
The NU Department of Administrative Services said the treasurer's office has the responsibility to keep the student information private and that it is working with the office to remove the information from the website.
Osborn said he'll give NU time to cull private student information from the 2009-10 expenditures that soon will be posted.
“I want to get the information that isn't confidential up in a timely manner,” Osborn said. "I don't want this to be an excuse to not be transparent in the state. The reward of transparency outweighs the risk here.”
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