Richard Read reports: A top U.S. Department of Education official has expressed concern about a loophole in a federal law that allows schools such as the University of Oregon to gain access to students’ private health-treatment records. Kathleen Styles, the agency’s chief privacy officer, sent a letter replying to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who along with…
Category: Youth & Schools
New Resource Page: An Overview of Education Privacy
Dan Solove writes: I recently created a new resource page for the TeachPrivacy site: An Overview of Education Privacy. Privacy is essential in education, and all educational institutions have duties to their communities to protect privacy robustly. Protecting privacy involves much more than just following FERPA. What does protecting privacy entail? Why does it matter?…
Everyone’s An Agent: UK Company Provides Spy Software To Teachers To Weed Out Child Terrorists
Timothy Geigner Never content to simply let America take a bad idea and run with it alone, these past few years have seen our friends in the UK slowly start to lose their collective minds concerning terrorism and radical Islam. It’s hard to be too terribly snarky about it, considering here in America we’ve done…
FTC Monitors Behavior Of Vendors That Signed Student Privacy Pledge
Meghan Ottolini reports: A number of high-profile technology companies signed a voluntary commitment in October to protect student data. According to Boston-based educational technology company Cengage, the Federal Trade Commission has monitored the behavior of several of these companies. The “Pledge to Safeguard Student Privacy” asks companies functioning in education technology to “not sell student…