The Hechinger Report
Why Your Student’s Personal Data Could Be Freely Bought and Sold
June 22, 2018
Strict federal privacy laws protect the private information of students. But those laws only apply to schools. As a new report from Fordham University shows, there are more than a dozen private brokers in the U.S. that can freely sell student data. These brokers advertise lists of students with all manner of specific characteristics, from home-schooled Christians to teenage girls interested in birth control. However, even after years of research, the authors of the study found it almost impossible to find out where the student data on these lists came from.