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…
Category: Featured News
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…
Girard threatened with legal action over student privacy issue
Carol Robidoux reports on an interesting FERPA privacy case out of Manchester, New Hampshire: A school board member who used social media and his public access TV show, “Girard at Large,” to expound on a student privacy issue that arose during a Nov. 13 school committee meeting has been threatened with legal action. A letter…
Google Attacked by EU Consumer Groups Over Location Tracking
Stephanie Bodoni and Natalia Drozdiak report: Google runs the risk of hefty fines from the European Union’s beefed-up data-protection watchdogs after consumer groups accused the search-engine giant of abusing tools that track users’ location. Seven European consumer organizations on Tuesday said they would file complaints with their national regulators, who now have powers to levy…