Midwest Chick's Place

Arizona State’s student body (plus some parents and alums) got a text from the Harris campaign.  It has raised some concerns about student privacy but it was all legal.  You see, there’s a loophole in FERPA regulations (the academic version of HIPPAA) that says that anything that is considered to be ‘directory information’ (and this list is publicly available) is good to be sold or given away as long as the student hasn’t put a privacy hold on his or her record.

And ASU’s directory information is a storehouse of information, especially if you were looking to engage in identity theft since they also include Date of Birth in information that can be disseminated.

But they aren’t alone–it happened in Wisconsin too, although was just targeted at student emails, rather than their cell phones.

More than 1000 universities signed on to an Obama era ‘study’ where data from the National Student Clearinghouse (which collects data from pretty much every university and college in the country on a student/extremely granular level) was (is) given to a group called L2.

According to a description by UC Berkeley, “L2 Voter Data supports research into voter behavior and demographics, by providing detailed demographic profiles, historical voting records, party affiliation data, and geospatial analysis tools. L2 Voter Data is a regularly updated database of all registered voters in the US, and contains voting records going back, in some cases, to 2001.”

L2 describes itself online as “working with clients from presidential campaigns to small advocacy organizations” with an “easy-to-use web-based interface [that] gives you the power to instantly analyze, purchase and export records.”

This release is being classified as a something to ‘improve student learning’ in order to get around FERPA.  But no one seems to be able to find out if the student data received is actually destroyed or not.  It’s supposed to be…..

 “Institutions that choose to participate in NSLVE sign an authorization form permitting the Clearinghouse to provide student names, addresses and dates of birth to a voter organization to match to that organization’s voter registration data,” a clearinghouse media relations official told The College Fix in a statement. “The matched dataset is then sent to the Clearinghouse, and the organization destroys the data it received from the Clearinghouse.”

It seems that the Dems are the ones who are pulling end-runs around student privacy.  But here’s another tidbit.  Students can use the privacy hold for university processes, but EVERYTHING goes to the Clearinghouse since they are a government contractor.

So if anyone has kids in college right now, best have them check their privacy holds in their student portal.