About the SSN Protection Project

The Ohio State University is implementing policies to protect Social Security numbers stored in university information systems from external exposure. To aid the implementation of these policies and provide additional safeguards, the SSN Protection project was created. This project consists of several initiatives that will be met by September 1, 2007. These initiatives include:

• Removing SSN from several categories of printed reports generated from the student systems, including both the class and grade roster reports
• Creating additional security measures around access and transmission to and from the Operational Data Store
• Providing workstation encryption to users with access to restricted data and supporting a university encryption solution

Online systems, such as MARX and BARS will continue to include the SSN; however, as a preferred practice, users should always attempt to first search by name and avoid searching by SSN.