Detective work - help

[dave.81]

If they are then it should be assumed that the contents are school related.

 

With students you can never assume that they are school related. I think contink has hit the nail on the head with the bag issue, you would open the bag to see how's it was, if you found a porn mag then you would report it. This is the same situation.

[Halfmad]

Rubbish! I am not responsible for illegal activity carried out using information stored on students' privately-owned pen drives. Returning to the day planner analogy, let's imagine someone finds my planner in a room somewhere, turns to the details on page 1, finds my name and returns it to me. What they didn't spot was that I had bomb making instructions on page 172 - when that blows up, is that person also responsible? Absolutely not.

 

But let's assume for a minute that you're right, and it is my job as Network Manager to check for risks to personal safety in the form of private data on misplaced pen drives. Surely that duty should also be extended to those pen drives which haven't been lost? So by your argument I should be taking pen drives off students (either at random or alphabetically) and checking them. I'm sorry, but get real!

 

I've no idea where you've got this personal safety issue from Nick!

 

You have a duty of care to pupils and staff, if a kid has something on a drive which passes through your hands, which you've opened in order to discover the owner and later turns out to cause harm then YES parents will point the finger at you and ask what the hell you were thinking. You're living in la-la land if you don't think that'd happen, we're not talking about logic here mate, we're talking about the typical knee jerk reaction that people have to IT. Nobody mentioned it making sense or you actually have a legal duty to check EVERYTHING but we all know what the public can be like and frankly yes they'd come after any IT staff that had passed the drive on without looking at it and ensuring the data and contents were safe.

[localzuk]

Halfmad - you are getting duty of care and stupid parents mixed up there. There is not a duty of care to check pen drives that go through our hands. If something is later found on there that later causes harm, then that is the parents' issue. It is their responsibility to check the belongings of their children - not ours.

 

That is why we have a 'no pen drives' policy for kids. They can email stuff via their school email accounts, which is monitored, and that is it.

[Halfmad]

Duty of care isn't as clear cut as some of you seem to think, this is one of the reasons I'm glad to be leaving the school IT sector shortly.

 

You don't have a duty to check drives, however if you have checked it and find something you can't ignore it. Likewise as you've been asked or have to find the owner of it, checking it really opens up a real can of worms.

 

I think if I'm ever in that situation it'd perhaps be best simply not to check the drives at all, hand them to the school office and wait for someone claim it!

[mrforgetful]

Can I check it, find something, look at it then deny all knowledge of knowing about it if at a later date it comes up?

[Halfmad]

Yeah, if you get anyone who seen you with it back your story up

[enjay]

You don't have a duty to check drives, however if you have checked it and find something you can't ignore it.

I think the key word there is "IF you find something". I wouldn't actively go looking at all the files on the drive, and would stop as soon as I knew whose pen it was, however IF I did find something in the course of doing this, I would act on it (if it is a child protection issue which we stumbled across, we'd legally have to act).

 

I think if I'm ever in that situation it'd perhaps be best simply not to check the drives at all, hand them to the school office and wait for someone claim it!

Where possible, I don't open any files when trying to identify the owner - usually, the author flag on the file will suffice. If I do open a file, then I make sure it is one which is clearly school-related, e.g. "coursework draft 1.doc" as this is the most likely file to have the kid's name on it. Also remember that the student would probably be able to describe their pen drive, so if you have 4 lost ones on your desk, they could say "it's blue and has a kitten key-ring on it" and thus allow you to return the correct pen to them without ever raising this issue. We encourage our students to rename their pen drive to their name, so if we do find one we can plug it in and see the name, so can return it without ever viewing even a directory listing of the contents.

 

Generally people will be happy that you've checked so that they get their pen drive back, or so that bullying/drug/etc issues get found while there is still time to deal with it, but for the 1 time in a 100 that someone takes exception to it, you need to make sure you're above reproach and cannot possibly be sued. It's sad that we have to think in this way, but that is the world in which we live.