Daniel Solove writes:
I have been spending a lot of time examining education privacy lately, and there are some very troubling things going on in this field. At a general level, schools lack much sophistication in how they handle privacy issues. Other industry sectors that handle sensitive personal data have Chief Privacy Officers and a comprehensive privacy program. Most schools lack anyone to handle privacy or any kind of privacy program. I recently started a new company called TeachPrivacy to address these issues and help schools better develop a privacy program.
Another problem with education privacy involves the growing effort by the government to amass data about students. The Obama Administration is aggressively pushing this information gathering — the development of what is called “longitudinal databases” — to study how students perform over the duration of their education. This effort, although certainly for laudable goals, carries significant privacy risks.
Read more on Concurring Opinions.