As part of the switch to the new student administration software PeopleSoft, students are now being issued new Brandeis Identification cards. The University will no longer use Social Security numbers to identify students, and thus will no longer have them encoded on the card's magnetic strip.Old ID cards will stop working in October and will no longer open doors or bill students' meal or WhoCash accounts, according to Associate Vice President of Students and Enrollment Brian Walton.

"We stepped away from Social Security number for identity purposes," Walton said. "We didn't want to have that on the Mag-Stripe continually. It printed at the off-campus terminal when students would use them at different points of sale off-campus."

Walton said that retailers in the area who accepted WhoCash could have potentially seen a student's Social Security numbers.

Walton said that while switching to PeopleSoft, the University simultaneously changed to a newer version of their electronic dining software-Diebold Gold.

This allowed the University to veer away from using Social Security numbers to charge student's meal plans and WhoCash accounts.

Previously, an ID card needed to contain the student's Social Security number for it to successfully debit a student's account.

One of nine proposals on how to spend the $122,000 found in a Union rollover account-eventually spent on the game room-suggested to use some of the money to investigate how to remove Social Security number from ID cards.

"With the current use of Social Security numbers for the purpose of Student Identification, the system generates a gross violation of privacy," the proposal read. "From the dining services to ordering food from off campus to receiving grades from the registrar, the SSN is treated as an insignificant series of 9 numbers."

The proposal also said that using Social Security numbers was a "serious issue."

It further read: "With someone else's social security number, bank statements, credit card history, a person's driver's license, insurance information, medical history, and other important documents can be accessed."

Last semester, the Justice learned a student using a $500 card encoder purchased on eBay encoded his friend's Social Security number onto his card and successfully debited an account other than his own without being caught.

But with the new system, obtaining another student's Social Security number will no longer give anyone access to a student's account.

But the Justice learned that the only information encoded on the new cards is the students' 15 digit ID number, which is also printed on the front under each student ID pictures-followed by a 0 for the card issue number.

"Well, I think it's a really good thing they took the Social Security numbers off the cards," the student told the Justice. "I've scanned a lot of other college ID's and almost all of them were encoded in some way, which Brandeis hasn't done."

"But I don't think it's really a problem here, so it's probably not worth the money they'd need to spend to encode them differently," he said.

Walton said he has not heard of any student impersonating another to steal meals or WhoCash with a falsely encoded card.

Walton said the University, in part with this change, has worked to be in compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which clarified what the University must do to protect "financial privacy information."

According to Walton, the only cost to the University with this initiative was purchasing the Diebold Gold system.

Because of this switch, the magnetic stripe on old Brandeis identification cards, which have a student's identification number encoded on them, will no longer work starting sometime in October.

According to Walton, the University started issuing the new cards in July and printed cards for returning students. The cards are available for pick-up at the campus card office in Kutz.