New Coalition Urges Congress to Listen to Parents and Strengthen Student Privacy Protections
A new coalition called the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy released a letter today to the leaders of the committees of the House and Senate Education Committees, urging Congress to strengthen FERPA and involve parents in the decision-making process to ensure that their children’s privacy is protected.
Many of the groups and individuals in the Coalition were involved in the battle over inBloom, which closed its doors last spring. They were shocked to learn during this struggle how federal privacy protections and parental rights to protect their children’s safety through the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) had eroded over the last decade.
The letter below calls for Congress to hold hearings and enact new privacy protections that would minimize the sharing of highly sensitive student data with vendors and among state agencies and would maximize the right of parents to notification and consent. The letter also asks for strict security requirements, that the law be enforceable through fines, and that parents have the right to sue if their children’s privacy is violated.
Parent Coalition for Student Privacy
July 23, 2014
Dear member of Congress:
We write on behalf of a broad coalition of parents across the country to urge Congressional review of emerging threats to student privacy rights and to request legislative action to address significant shortcomings in current law. Specifically, we are alarmed about ill-thought-through federal policies that, instead of providing safeguards against non-consensual disclosure and downstream uses of children’s personally identifiable information, actually promote policies in which a child’s highly sensitive personal data is disclosed to third-parties for purposes that go well beyond reasonable educational uses and deny parents the right of notification or consent.
First, we respectfully urge Congress to hold hearings on why the U.S. Department of Education has abdicated its historic role as the guardian of educational privacy rights. In responding to interest groups that included Big Data enthusiasts, influential New Coalition Urges Congress to Listen to Parents and Strengthen Student Privacy Protections | Seattle Education: