Associated Press reports:
Auditor Dave Yost told state education leaders Monday that an Ohio law blocking the state from accessing students’ personal information is hampering district tracking efforts and wasting money.
Under a state law aimed at protecting children’s privacy, the Ohio Department of Education must keep track of nearly 1.9 million public school students across the state without names, addresses or Social Security numbers.
Yost’s office is in the midst of a statewide investigation into potential attendance tampering by Ohio school districts, and he said auditors are finding the arrangement unwieldy.
Read more on NBC.
So if protecting students’ privacy is time-consuming and costly, let’s just do with that, huh? What about the increased risks of privacy and security breaches if the data are so easily identifiable?
And so it begins… massive databases that states have access to and that can be linked to other databases.
Protecting privacy can be costly. Not protecting it can be even more costly.