By Gavin Mackintosh-
A Cambridge University student-led inquiry into reports of a data breach at the Cambridge Student Union (SU) has been abandoned and replaced with the hope of an external inquiry, leading to allegations that a “culture of secrecy and cover-ups has become endemic within the SU”.
Members of the student union are livid after the chair of the Student Union board of trustees and current SU undergraduate president, Zaynab Ahmed,(pictured) told a student meeting yesterday evening that the board of trustees had unanimously voted to block the inquiry on the grounds that the decision to launch an one was beyond the remit of the student council.
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The alleged data breach which included information about students’ sexuality, gender, race and disabilities, was made available to students running elections at the university on the platform without the explicit knowledge of the students providing the data in 2022. It caused a storm within the Student Union and among other students who heard about the situation.
The students who were in charge of the inquiry subsequently expressed “serious concerns about the ability of the student union to handle sensitive data and conduct itself professionally.”
The relevance of the alleged data breach concerned the fact that students had been “effectively outed without even knowing it” last year because information about students’ sexualities, gender identities, race and disabilities, declared anonymously in some SU-run elections, was accessible to committee members running elections for other societies without the permission of the students themselves.
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The leaked information was to be used by committee members of the Student Union to determine whether they felt it was fair for students from certain demography to participate in the voting on the grounds of whether the may be biased or not.
The original system had allowed societies to change the name of the person holding a role on the SU website from a drop down list of all valid candidates for the position.
However, positions that required self-id list was limited to students who had told the system that they identified with the relevant identity. The solution the SU implemented was to prevent students from viewing this information was to remove the ability of students to change the names of listed officials on the SU website entirely. This would presumably address the leak.
According to an anonymous source from Cambridge University told this publication: ”if there were too few voters who were LGBT voting for someone up for a post who was LGBT, it would be deemed unfair, and a demand for more gay voters would have been made, meaning some of the straight voters would be excluded from voting. Ethnicity would be useful in informing some of those up for elections whether they were fairly represented among the voters”
”The problem was that those who did not consent to their sexuality being given out felt the information could also be used in a biased way against them, and consider the intimate details of their sexuality a private matter.
The issue was presented to the Information Commissioner’s Office for a ruling, and the ICO concluded no data breach occurred”.
After the issue was brought to the attention of Student Union staff in January 2022, it remained unaddressed until October of last year when the student council voted to launch a student-led inquiry to determine “the nature and full extent of the problem” , and establish why “the incident occurred and was not resolved for over nine months after first being raised”.
The fact the council also voted to reject a motion to pass responsibility for conducting an inquiry to the board of trustees over concerns that it would cause a conflict of interest has only intensified the cloud of suspicion over the whole affair.
The trustee board of the SU comprising five elected sabbatical officers, three student members, and four external trustees, have now unanimously voted to end the inquiry and recruit an external investigator. It has not yet been established who the external investigator would be.
The Eye Of Media.Com has offered to conduct the investigation, but insiders at the union believe the authorities are likely to look else where to suit themselves.
SU president Ahmed stressed told student paper Varsity that the board is as concerned as students but has not addressed the main issues bothering concerned students.
A complaining student also told the paper that students were met with ”delays, prevarication, non-responses to reasonable requests, and an unwillingness to engage with the seriousness of this issue.” Students have decried the lack of response and accountability to complaints from students.
The Student Union was contacted for comment this morning, but its receptionist told this publication it had no readily available person to attend to our queries. She requested for questions to be sent my mail, but no response was forthcoming by the end of the working day. Its own sense of accountability appears to be lacking.
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