Potential privacy breach
Dear Faculty Colleagues:
Last week, multiple members notified SAFA that on the morning of Wednesday February 10, 2021, instructors who had at least one team-taught course in the fall term were given shared access to view not just their SFQ summary report but also their co-instructor’s reports. This was immediately forwarded to SAIT senior management for their attention. As a follow-up, SAIT provided the following information:
The reports were disabled at 8 am while SAIT investigated and worked on a fix. The SAIT team received in total about half a dozen messages from instructors/chairs/associate deans alerting SAIT to the issue. They have responded to each of them, letting them know the reports were immediately taken offline while the issue was being investigated and resolved. SAIT knows what caused the problem and are waiting for confirmation from the supplier. If SAIT’s assumptions are correct, it only affects the instructor-term summary reports for Fall 2020-2021.
Next steps:
SAIT’s team is working with the service provider to ensure the institution understands the full scope of this situation, understands how many summary reports were accessed, and works through the opportunities to ensure this situation doesn’t occur again.
SAFA is concerned about this potential privacy breach and will be closely monitoring SAIT’s response. This process may take a bit of time but SAFA will provide updates on the issue as we receive them from SAIT.
In solidarity and service to members,