Tech group takes issue with student privacy bill

A major tech trade group expressed concerns with a House student privacy bill that it said would “create undue costs for our member companies" without sufficient benefit to any involved party. The legislation in question is an update of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, the main federal law that protects student privacy. The House version of the Student Privacy Protections Act includes provisions that require parties under the law, such as companies that provide technological tools to schools, to notify parents of data breaches. But The Internet Association said in a letter to leaders of the House Education and Workforce Committee and the bill’s sponsors that the requirements were too broad.

“As currently drafted, the data security and privacy provisions of the bill impose vague security requirements, including notice requirements triggered by a ‘breach of the security practices,’ which theoretically could include common employee errors such as failing to properly sign-in a visitor or failing to logout of a computer when going to get coffee for 5 minutes,” the group’s president, Michael Beckerman, said in the letter.