KSA executives accused of leaving private information online

Matter settled in-camera.

Members of the Kwantlen Student Association were asked several times to remove club information from the KSA website, which included private and identifiable information of students.

This information has since been removed. Whether or not any sort of disciplinary action took place is unknown to The Runner, as any such decisions were decided at an in-camera meeting. A meeting can be moved to in-camera for issues pertaining to property, human resources, or legal reasons.

Steven Button, vice-president of student services at the KSA, says that they had changed their regulations with regard to private information.

“We wanted to make sure that student information was not being shared,” says Button.

“It changed the way we had to create our executive agendas. We’re no longer allowed to include club constitutions or most planning tools as public information. That kind of conflicted with our desire to ensure that we are providing all of the information we can to anyone who’s interested in the executive committee.”

“By the time this got to governance, the issue had been resolved,” he says. “It’s a non-issue, because it has been taken care of.”

Leah Godin, Langley campus representative, brought the complaint to council.

“I brought the issue up to council in September,” says Godin, mentioning that the KSA has an obligation to students to keep their information confidential.

It came to Godin’s attention that private information from club constitutions was online. “It includes their full name, their personal cell phone number, their email addresses as well as their student numbers, which is confidential information,” says Godin.

In the agenda from the Jan. 23 meeting of the Standing Committee on Governance, Godin lists the KPBru Club Constitution Package, Emerging Green Builders Club Constitution Package and the Enactus Club Constitution Package as documents that wrongfully contained personally identifiable information.

“In October at council, it passed, to include student numbers under the freedom of information act,” says Godin.

At the Oct. 17 council meeting, Godin had recommended a motion that a KSA regulation be amended to define what “confidential documents” consisted of. It was changed to include matters of human resources, legal, property sales and purchases, and in-camera meetings. Also included was personal information, as further defined by the Personal Information Privacy Act, a B.C. law.

“Within the next executive meeting, which was a week later, they did the same thing and put a constitution up, for a new club,” says Godin. “So I told them about it. I [said], ‘You guys have to really take that down, because you’re not being accountable to the students, and they didn’t sign to have their personal information and student numbers online.’”

Godin says that similar postings happened in November and December. In January, Godin wrote up a full, detailed complaint and brought it to council, after issuing several verbal warnings.

However, the ultimate outcome was decided in camera, meaning proceedings were private, and unknowable to the public. Neither Steven Button, nor Leah Godin, were legally allowed to comment on these proceedings.

“Neither myself, nor the executive committee, has ever been reprimanded by council,” says Button. “Nor are there any pending recommendations for any such reprimand.”