A broken radio?A comment:
Stop going on and on like a broken radio. All govts f**k up, just look at the US financial meltdown. The important thing is realising the mistake.First thing, broken radios don't make a noise: I do. Secondly, ignore the financial meltdown: that's all a fantasy. Money is nothing but an IOU and living on credit is running on empty.
This isn't a government f**k up
per se except in the need for someone to be held responsible. In terms of the ramifications, that's
32,858,277 - an increase of 15,492 since yesterday - Indonesian school students put at potential risk. Although parents and teachers quickly came to recognise what an almighty cock up this is, judging by the extremely slow and inept response, we're not sure that those responsible for it understand what they have done.
The friend who found his children's details online has written to me.
You wonder how I found the URL? All I did was put my child's complete name in quotation marks into Google and the URL popped up at the top of the list in less than a second. I asked a colleague to do the same kind of search with her son's name and had the same results. A third colleague has her child in a private International school and her search came up empty.Why the difference?Because international schools are not Indonesian schools, and quite wisely in educational terms don't register their students for Indonesian exams.
I have called my son's school and asked why my son's name and other private data were posted on the site. They were unaware of the situation. They will contact me later after they poke around a bit. I alerted the Jakarta Post and suggested that they run a story but I checked The Post quickly a while ago but found nothing.I've spoken to a few school principals this week and none of them, or their teachers were aware that their students enrolment details were online.
One of the best summations on the issue I have read so far is by Henzter who left a comment on the post
Privacy and Children on Rob Baiton's blog.
I've been trying to follow this closely too, if only to keep several of my friends abreast with the news because their children's names are on the list.Anyway, I've read that the data are not supposed to be widely available and that it was designed to have "sistem keamanan sesuai tingkatannya"(security system). Unfortunately, a blunder somewhere in the pipeline caused it to be made available to the public to such extent. This is where things go south.It took them four days (at least) from the day bloggers started to create some noise up until the time when "some data" were taken off the xls spreadsheets. And it seems that they did this reluctantly. See here and here (in Indonesian on Detik.com, the main internet news portal in the country).These two newsbytes can be summed up as those "higher-ups" asking: "what's the big deal about privacy?"In other words,
1. making student data available to the public is comparable to making civil servants & government official data public.2. privacy is a relative thing.3. there's no proof (of potential danger?)
and all this is considered fearmongering (kekhawatiran [tak berdasar], tidak ada bukti).And they have conveniently forgotten the fact that these are children we're talking about here - those we need to take extra measure to protect.So what if businessmen put their numbers and address as their email signatures?So what if government official personal data are made publicly available?But we're not talking about businessmen or government officials: we're talking about children.Compare this to a similar case happening in the UK where details of junior student doctors were unwittingly leaked.Schooling is about passing or failing set tests. The schools system is a basically a conveyor belt which runs efficiently because there's no-one interfering, so the publication of an immenses amount of data presumably satisfies an ordained productivity quota. Given that the bureaucrats responsible are graduates of this system, it could be argued that they have done well.
Education is about thinking. The seeming insouciance among the officials concerned indicates an almost total lack of comprehension of the ramifications of their action. It also demonstrates quite clearly that the Indonesian education system is poorly managed and in need of a thorough overhaul. After all, the bureaucrats responsible are graduates of the system.
Another link on Detik records how this issue has been taken up by bloggers. This is one of the first communal actions we've taken across the spectrum of political and religious differences.
BTW. The data is still there but inaccessible:
Mohon maaf fasilitas download data siswa secara online real time telah ditutup. Selanjutnya mohon menghubungi Kantor Dinas Pendidikan Kota/Kabupaten setempat untuk melakukan verifikasi dan validasi data siswa dimaksud. Mohon maaf atas ketidaknyamanan layanan online ini.
Ttd.
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