Last month, ConnectEDU, a popular college and career planning portal in Boston that had collected personal details on millions of high school and college students, filed for bankruptcy.
Now federal regulators want to stop the company from selling off students’ names, email addresses, birth dates and other intimate information as assets.
In a letter sent Thursday to the bankruptcy judge in the case, Jessica L. Rich, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, argued that such a sale would violate ConnectEDU’s own privacy policy, a potentially deceptive practice.
The company’s privacy policy states that, in the event of a sale of the company, it “will give users reasonable notice and an opportunity to remove personally identifiable data from the service.”
The ConnectEDU bankruptcy and potential sale of its databases come at a time of heightened concern over the bulk collection of student information by private education technology companies.
Over the last few years, a number of prominent education privacy experts, federal and state legislators, consumer advocates and parents have warned that the data-mining practices of educational technology firms are eclipsing longstanding federal protections for student information.
“Information about teens is particularly sensitive and may warrant even greater privacy protections than those accorded to adults,” Ms. Rich wrote in the letter. “These users, as well as their parents, would likely be concerned if their information transferred without restriction to a purchaser for unknown uses.”
ConnectEDU did not immediately respond to a voicemail message seeking comment. An email sent to press@connectedu.com resulted in an error message.
A federal law, called the Family Educational and Privacy Rights Act, or FERPA, generally requires schools to obtain consent from parents before sharing their children’s educational records. But an exception allows schools to outsource school functions — like school busing, or data storage and analysis — to outside companies.
Issues surrounding students’ rights to access and control their own personal information have become more prominent over the last few months.
Under fire from parents and privacy advocates, inBloom, a nonprofit student data repository largely financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, announced last month that it was closing. Parents and privacy advocates had raised objections to its plans to collate and streamline disparate academic, attendance and disciplinary data on behalf of schools.
Google last month also announced month that it would halt ad-scanning in Gmail in its Google Apps for Education product, a response to scrutiny it received for scanning student email for potential targeting of advertisements.
And two weeks ago, two prominent federal senators announced that they intended to amend the education privacy law to give parents and their children greater control over the proliferation of students’ personal details.
The issues raised by the bankruptcy of ConnectEDU are likely to provide more ammunition for the senators’ effort to amend the law.
Founded in 2002, ConnectEDU developed college and career-planning sites where students could create personal listings; detail their academic achievements and interests; build resumes; and interact with teachers, mentors and potential employers.
It registered more than 20 million students as well as 5,000 educational institutions and 130,000 employers in 40 countries, according to the company’s website. Among them, more than 140 schools and districts in Massachusetts signed up for a special state portal, developed by ConnectEDU, the site said.
In her letter to the bankruptcy judge, Ms. Rich of the F.T.C. recommended either that ConnectEDU give each student who had registered for its sites the choice to remove his or her personal records from company databases in advance of a sale -– or that the company destroy the entirety of the personal details it had collected.