Professor Joel Reidenberg’s research was cited in a Washington Post article about the potential weakening of student privacy laws that could increase the use of student data for commercial purposes.
A class-action lawsuit was filed in August 2018 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles alleging that ACT identified student disability status through this information on the score reports sent to colleges and sold this information to colleges and other third parties. In a recent legal filing, ACT informed the court that it will no longer sell student disability status in the data collected voluntarily by students, but refused to admit to flagging its regular score reports with this information.
As Joel Reidenberg, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, head of the Center on Law and Information Policy, told the New York Times in 2018: “The harm is that these children are being profiled, stereotyped, and their data profiles are being traded commercially for all sorts of uses — including attempts to manipulate them and their families.”
A research report co-written by Reidenberg found that there exists a thriving marketplace in student data, in which brokers offer a wide variety of sensitive student information for sale, including their ethnicity, income, religion, and interests, and that this data could “be used for a range of malicious purposes, including discrimination and identity theft.”