Indeed the U pushes FERPA pretty heavily, and our Registrar at UMM has been really good at keeping FERPA clearly in everyone’s mind. As you say, though, most parents probably don’t know much about FERPA, or the risks involved.

Boy, I’m glad to hear that UST has stopped using SSN like that. The University of Texas used SSNs as the primary ID when I was a grad student there, which I didn’t really think about at the time. In retrospect, however, that was an amazingly ungood idea.

One side effect of this recent loss is that plans for a national ID card in the UK are going to lose a lot of support, and they didn’t have much to begin with. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

As a staff member at a University myself, I think about this on a pretty regular basis. My guess is that you are familiar with FERPA, but a lot of parents aren’t.

And I am exactly the kind of guy who can gain access to all sorts of important data like birthdays, etc. UST finally made the move about two months ago to stop using SSN as an open identifier, which I think was very smart.

Yeah, the cyber world is a very, very creepy place sometimes.