Chaos @ Union
THE OXFORD UNION could face fines after it emerged that the recent email lists sent to members advertising the Ice Ball were sent to some 19,000 people and are in direct contravention of the Data Protection Act and the University's own IT rules.
The Union will not release to the public any information about possible charges against Committee members relating to the violation of the Data Protection Act, but they are currently personally apologising to individual complaints relating to numerous e-mails received.
A former Chair of the Consultative Committee (CCC) at the Union said: "An error of this size is unprecedented and calls into question the fitness of those responsible to remain in their posts."
The mistake has provoked strong debate within the Union after it also emerged that Standing Committee had approved the manual emailing of the Union's entire database to advertise its ball. In the absence of the current CCC, Matthew Richardson, the task was passed to the ex-CCC from last term, Matthew Taylor.
Richardson told the Oxford Student that Taylor had "tried very hard" but refused to comment further on the mistake, in which hundreds of email addresses were placed in the 'To' section of the email, instead of in a Blind Carbon Copy box. This made all email addresses visible to to the recipients.
The Data Protection Act states that "a person must not knowingly or recklessly, without the consent of the Data Controller, obtain or disclose information contained in personal data." Any group guilty of violoating this act is "guilty of an offence" and "liable to a fine."
Students have reported receiving junk email from outside the University in their Herald accounts since the initial message last week.
One student received an advertisement in his Herald account which claims to offer a computer disc it suggests will allow him to access a database of 20 million email addresses in the USA for marketing purposes.
The VP-Graduates at OUSU, Catherine Sangster, who is not a member of the Union, also received emails. She was told that this was because her predecessor had been a member and that Union databases had not been updated.
The Oxford Union has explained that although 19,000 emails were sent out, only 9,000 were received correctly.
Certain Oxford University societies, including the OU Pakistan Society, also took advantage of the 9,000 e-mail addresses, overloading Herald with mass e-mails about society events. Other students emailed advertising CDs. As a result, the University network was down for several hours over the weekend and on Monday morning.
The Unix systems programmer at OUCS said: "There have been problems with the University network. If we get a huge spurt of mail coming in, this will slow down the service. There is little we can do until all the mail has been processed."
The University's IT rules currently prevent students from "the transmission, without proper authorisation, of email to a large number of recipients, unless those recipients have indicated an interest in receiving such email."
In order to prevent mass e-mailing network failures, the Computing Services has now separated the domain name service and Herald e-mail accounts so that they will not be able to affect each other.
If a student takes advantage of the thousands of released e-mail addresses, their Herald account will be disabled and they may receive further repercutions from the University Proctors.
Union Press Officer, Daniel Johnson, said: "We do apologise. It was an administrative error and it won't happen again."
8th Nov 2001