Student Privacy Bill Moves to House/Senate Conference
The Senate has passed S. 290, a bill that would require schools to get parental permission before letting third parties collect personal information from students for commercial use.
The bill, which is actually an amendment to President Bush’s overall education bill, will now go to a joint House/Senate Conference committee. The committee is likely to take up the matter within the next several weeks, said Andrea Andrews, a spokeswoman for Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), one of the bill’s co-sponsors.
The Direct Marketing Association opposes the bill because it feels that marketers who need to gather information from students to produce things like yearbooks, class rings and the like would now have an unnecessarily difficult job. “We just think they haven’t thought it through,” said DMA senior vice president of government affairs Jerry Cerasale.
Specifically, the bill requires schools to obtain parents’ permission before allowing non-educational marketing or data collection activities to take place in classrooms. The legislation would allow local school boards, in consultation with parents, to provide additional exceptions to the consent requirements so long as the information they seek to collect is not personally identifiable and the school notifies parents of its data-collection policy.
Sens. Richard Shelby (R-AL) and Christopher Dodd (D-CT) introduced the bill, the Student Privacy Protection Act, last February after a General Accounting Office study revealed that marketers and advertisers are increasingly targeting school children often without their parents’ knowledge.
