Earth Calling Indonesian Department of Education

Helloooo… have you guys heard of this thing called privacy? Yes? So why did you make personal details of 37million (and counting) students across Indonesia available online? From Elementary School up to College and Universities? Including their school, home address, place and date of birth? And in neat Excel spreadsheets organised by province and region? And available for download by any perv with an internet connection and not-very-good intentions?

Knowing how kaypoh (nosy) Indonesians usually are (they will ask you everything about your personal life), maybe PRIVACY or IDENTITY THEFT aren’t exactly words they’re too familiar with. Maybe KIDNAPPING, or BURGLARY, or RAPE, or TERRORIST sound more familiar?

Hell, why don’t they publish a print catalogue along with it to be distributed to all schools and available at a bookstore near you.

Leave me a message if you’re curious about the link. Or you can do a Google search on your own. I don’t want to post the link here for everyone to see, increasing the possibility of some poor kid getting stalked by some sexually deprived mid-age “Oom” from Friendster.

To be fair, the intention was to enable teachers and schools to ensure their students are already registered under the Department of Education, along with their national studentID number. Good enough. And the Internet is an obvious medium to make this database easily accessible. But they could at least implement a password / security measure if they REALLY want to put it online? I know it’s not that simple with the programming and database building and whatnot, but an extra year or so of building a secure system will certainly be worth it?

Oh yes. I forgot. *slaps forehead* You guys aren’t concerned with privacy. Right.

I suspect this is one of the side-effects of the increase of the national budget for education up almost 100% from 2 years back. This is obviously an improvement, as education has been neglected quite badly for the longest time in Indonesia. But as Cafe Salemba noted, they should have a clear plan on how to spend it. Otherwise the budget will be used to fund pointless projects such as this one.

On another note, a friend pointed out that the government must’ve missed out on something more urgent: a worryingly small percentage of legislative candidates have their profiles available on the Candidates profile website. The header reads:

Apologies, Citizen of Indonesia. Only 32 out of 11,868 candidates have identities – For Election 2008

Others on the same issue:

• Treespotting
• Loose Wire Blog
• BudiPutra.com
• Venus (in Indonesian)
• Leonnie (in Indonesian)