Due to a mailing mishap involving two mistakes, the University of Maryland at College Park sent parking brochures to current students with their Social Security Numbers printed on the label.
“The number wasn’t actually identifiable as a social security number,” explained Lee Tune, Associate Director for Public Affairs Strategy. The SSN’s were printed along the top of the shipping label with no identifiers or hyphens that would make it obvious. “It just looks like a string of numbers.”
Shipping labels from UMD normally bring up the University ID number, which is a different identifying number than the student’s SSN. The first mistake occurred when somewhere along the process, the SSN was brought up instead of the UID. The second mistake came when they were left on the labels. “That’s usually stripped anyway,” said Tune.
The SSN’s of each person only appeared on their own shipping label.
Tune expressed the apologies of the University, stressing that as soon as the mistake was realized, they moved “aggressively” to alert students of the University’s error. The University has made every effort to notify the students of the error by mail or e-mail, most of whom did not notice the error until it was pointed out to them.
The University is offering one free year of credit monitoring to those 23,727 current students whose SSN was printed on their shipping labels.
“It’s really a pretty low risk but the University is treating [the situation] and taking every aggressive step they can,” said Tune. “And of course they’ve taken steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”