Joel Reidenberg was quoted in an NBC news report about how universities handle government requests for student data.
Last year, the University of California, Berkeley, announced that it was publishing a transparency report detailing government requests for data, similar to what tech companies including Google and Facebook have been doing for years.
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In 2015, the university received a total of 32 requests for student and faculty data, either for internal investigations, court cases, or from government and law enforcement agencies.Extrapolating that number across the country isn’t easy, however, because other universities haven’t followed suit. That means we really don’t have a good idea of how often the government is asking for student data, according to Joel Reidenberg, director of Fordham’s Center on Law and Information Policy.
“It makes it very difficult to have effective oversight of the government if we don’t know what the government is doing,” Reidenberg told NBC News.
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Want to know what a student ate for dinner? Many of them swipe university-issued cards to pay for meals and enter buildings. Financial information, health records and even class assignments are stored in college databases. It’s even possible for a university to know where a student has traveled on campus by looking at which Wi-Fi transmitters they have connected to, Reidenberg said.