Legislators Introduce Student Digital Privacy Bill

Months after President Barack Obama proposed to strengthen digital privacy protection for students, two legislators, Reps Jared Polis (D-CO) and Luke Messer (R-IN) introduced a comprehensive bill in Congress intended to accomplish that goal. Titled the Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015, the bill would prohibit operators of websites, apps and other online services for kindergartners through 12th graders from knowingly selling students’ personal information to third parties; from using or disclosing students’ personal information to tailor advertising to them; and from creating personal profiles of students unless it is for a school-related purpose.

The bill would give parents access to information held about their children and allow them to correct it; to delete information about their children that schools do not need to retain; and to download any material their children have created. It would allow operators of services to use and disclose aggregated student information without personal identifiers to improve their own educational products or market their effectiveness. And it would allow companies to sell or disclose student information as part of a merger or acquisition, provided the successor company continued to be subject to the restrictions under which the data was originally collected. The bill was modeled in part on a new student online privacy law in California.