Student Privacy Bills Would Limit Use Of Student Data

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Educational institutions — and the government — is concerned with protecting sensitive information of their students, and legislation regarding student information privacy has been emerging in the past year. Proposed regulations could help define how student data can be stored and used.

While federal student privacy legislation including the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) address student data privacy, educators, privacy advocates, legislators, and industry members are divided about whether that legislation does enough to protect privacy in our present digital age and whether further regulations would hinder tech advancements. The Center for Digital Education reports, although new federal legislation was introduced in late July, some states have been moving to address the issue on their own, with at least 83 bills in 32 states being considered as of April 2014, according to the Data Quality Campaign.

Last fall, California took the lead in student data privacy and sent two bills to Gov. Jerry Brown. SB 1177 lays out privacy guidelines for operators of Internet websites, online services, online applications, and mobile application, while AB 1584 deals with contracts between local educational agencies and third-party technology vendors.

Last month, Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) introduced the Protecting Student Privacy Act in the U.S. Senate, a bipartisan bill that is designed to bar student-identifiable information from being used for marketing purposes, allow parents to access and edit errors in student information in the hands of private companies, and make transparent the names of all third parties using student data. It also requires private parties to delete redundant or non-pertinent student information.

The Senate bill joins another proposal in Congress, after Reps. Luke Messer (R-IN) and Jared Polis (D-CO) introduced the Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015 in the House a few weeks earlier. Passage of this bill would prohibit target advertising to students, selling student data to a third party, or creating a profile of the student for non-school-related purposes. Parents also would have the right to delete data that isn’t essential for the school to maintain.