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Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Some Privacy Activists Not Pleased with Markey-Hatch Bill

Privacy activists are not pleased with the draft bill to tighten up student privacy protections being circulated on the Hill by Sens. Ed Markey and Orrin Hatch.

“This bill is entirely inadequate to address parent concerns about privacy,” said Leonie Haimson, an activist who has organized parents to press for greater safeguards.

Another parent activist, Barmak Nassirian, said he found elements of the bill useful, but overall he believed that “it falls short of what’s urgently needed.”

Nassirian pointed in particular to a provision barring schools from sharing student educational records with anyone who might use them “to advertise or market a product or service.” Such a crackdown is needed, he said — but it doesn’t go far enough. Nassirian argues for a broader restriction on nearly all commercial use of student data. For instance, he doesn’t want companies mining children’s files for insight into their needs and then developing new products based on that information.

And he called for a blanket statement that “data collected for one purpose should not be used for another purpose,” unless parents explicitly consent.

Haimson, meanwhile, said the proposed FERPA update did little to prevent highly sensitive information, including health, disability and discipline data, from being shared with private companies without parental consent. Parents, she said, need more control over their children’s data; they need to know exactly who is holding what and why.


“If legislators believe that parents should be included in the discussion over student privacy, they should actually try to listen to what we’re saying,” Haimson said.

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