Earlier this year, the Council became aware of a website, teacherslookup.com, which had copied publicly available information from the Register of Teachers and reposted it on its own website. Since then, we implemented a number of IT system enhancements and have carefully monitored the situation. We are satisfied that the unauthorised copying of data has not re-occurred. An information notice regarding this matter was posted on the Teaching Council website on 15 July.
Please note that, under Section 29 of the Teaching Council Acts 2001-2015, the Council is required to make some information held on the Register of Teachers available to the public. In this light, it is important to note that the information posted on the teacherslookup website is information which is publicly available on the published “Register of Teachers”, as distinct from the private personal “My Registration” information held by the Teaching Council.
However, the Council is very aware that the presentation of information on the teacherslookup website, especially the availability of school addresses and the inclusion of a teacher comment box, is causing concern among teachers.
Accordingly, we wish to reassure teachers that the Teaching Council has now increased the security protocol on the website by installing a captcha and a “no robot” protocol. We are also continuing to cooperate fully with the Data Protection Commissioner’s office on this matter.
Further to recent clarification from the Data Protection Commissioner’s office, we now intend to write to the US federal authorities to ask them to remove the website. In addition, we are writing to Google to request them to take steps to prevent teacherslookup appearing in the search results if a teacher’s name is searched.
The legal advice we have received is that the location of the website outside of the Irish and EU jurisdiction means that the Council cannot compel the removal or shut down of the site. While the option of legal action in US courts is a possibility, it could prove to be very expensive and protracted with no guarantee of a successful outcome. Even if we were successful, the creators of the site could simply create a new website and copy the information they already have across to there.
Websites such as this depend on a sufficient number of clicks and visits to generate advertising. Therefore the more visits it receives, the higher the revenue and the higher the search result appears. For these reasons, we think that the best approach is not to encourage more visits to this website and to limit the attention it gets.
We take this matter very seriously and are committed to ensuring the integrity of data held on our internal and external systems.
