Joe Cadillic writes: This year was full of many disturbing stories, like the one about Bloomberg’s role-playing workshops being used to convince the public to accept police drones equipped with microphones. And another about politicians claiming police drones will help revitalize a downtown and create community connections. None of that could have prepared me for…
Category: Featured News
Oath Agrees to $5 Million Settlement Over Children’s Privacy Online
Sapna Maheshwari reports: Oath, the owner of AOL and Yahoo, has agreed to pay about $5 million to settle charges from the New York attorney general that the media company’s online advertising business was violating a federal children’s privacy law. AOL, through its ad exchange, helped place targeted display ads on hundreds of websites that…
Protecting Privacy of School Directory Information
Amelia Vance has an important piece on NASBE about FERPA and directory information. Her piece includes some research conducted last year: In 2017, data analyst Leah Figueroa sent email requests to 10 institutions of higher education asking for “a listing of student directory information.” Three schools requested that she fill out a Freedom of Information…
Inspector General Blasts U.S. Ed. Department’s Handling of FERPA Complaints
Benjamin Herold reports: The U.S. Education Department failed to conduct timely, effective investigations of potential violations of the nation’s main student-data-privacy law, allowing a years-long backlog of unresolved cases to pile up without any mechanism for effectively tracking the number or status of the complaints it received. That’s according to a scathing new audit from the department’s…