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A data protection officer sharply criticizes the virtual tour of a school in Basel. This takes him off the grid.
Until recently, anyone who wanted to take a look at the secondary school in Aesch could do so on the Internet. The school had posted a virtual tour there. With a few clicks, anyone who wanted could look around in different rooms, including classrooms.
Those who entered the classrooms virtually could not only get an impression of the space and atmosphere, but also see telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and photos of the young people who go to school there. The class had hung many things on the walls. In addition to a photo poster of a schoolgirl in a bikini, you could also see who had done a taster apprenticeship where and who will get an apprenticeship where – or not. In addition, there were contact details for the young people and the training companies.
Legend:
Depending on the resolution, you can see a lot of private information about the young people on the virtual tour of the school.
SRF
The photos, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of the young people are particularly sensitive
Confronted with the virtual tour, data protection expert Ursula Uttinger is amazed. She suspects that the virtual tour was well intentioned, but she was “shocked” when it came to data protection. It is a breach of data protection. “The photos, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of the young people are particularly sensitive,” says Uttinger.
I was amazed that you could see the poster so well.
The criticism of the data protection expert does not bounce off the headmaster Carol Rietsch. He took the tour off the internet after being confronted with the allegations by SRF. He told SRF that he watched the tour himself before it was released, but on a device where the resolution was less good than others. “We assumed that you wouldn’t see these details,” he says of the sensitive data that the school had published. The fact that the schoolgirl’s bikini poster is so easy to see online is “not okay,” admits Rietsch frankly. “I was amazed that you could see the poster so well.”
Rundtelefon instead of Whatsapp because of data protection
The fact that the data protection breach happened in Baselland of all places is not without a certain irony. The Basel-based director of education, Monica Gschwind, takes data protection at school very seriously: years ago, she banned classes from communicating with Whatsapp class chats. That was not flawless in terms of “data protection,” she said at the time. The “good, old circular telephone” is tedious, but you have to do it that way.
However, the virtual tour of the school in Aesch was not approved by any cantonal authority. The school management had not consulted either the education department or the specialist office for data protection, but had independently put the tour online.