FERPA is Worthless at Protecting Student Data
Louisiana education politics blogger Crazy Crawfish has a great article on FERPA entitled “FERPA Does Not Protect Student Privacy and Never Did.” He explains how the law is outdated and how it has been gutted through U.S. Department of Education rule changes.
Money quote:
This means US ED has no authority over vendors or use or misuse data, that it must first try and convince abusers to stop abusing and disclosing the data they have received, and that their only recourse is to forbid school districts from providing data to them directly for 5 years or more. However if they obtain the data from another source, say another vendor, agencies can bypass even this very minor censure. Additionally, since DOE has no enforcement mechanism provided by FERPA, agencies can ignore this decision with impunity. This is why inBloom is not going out of business with no one officially committing to provide data to them. They intend to get this data secretly other ways and through other avenues. FERPA does allow schools, school districts and states to state their own civil penalties in their