Know what happens to student data before you upload it
A college application file is one of the most complete records that will ever exist about a teenager: essays that talk about family, health, and money; transcripts and test scores; sometimes disability accommodations and financial aid detail. Families hand that file to independent educational consultants, and consultants hand it to software.
What happens next is not hypothetical. When the college-planning platform ConnectEDU went bankrupt in 2014, the personal information of more than 20 million students was listed among the assets for sale, and the FTC had to write to the bankruptcy court to argue for families' right to notice and deletion. In 2023 the FTC charged Edmodo, a free classroom platform, with using children's data for advertising without parental consent. And clauses that let a vendor keep "de-identified" copies forever, train AI models on student essays, or pass records to whoever buys the company are sitting in real privacy policies right now.
None of this means the software is off limits. It means the reading matters, and it usually falls to the consultant. This site is a free, vendor-neutral toolkit for checking what any platform will do with student data before you upload it, written for consultants, not lawyers.
Two tools
- The Checklist: nine questions to ask before you upload student data to any platform. Printable, one page, made for vendor demos.
- The Prompt Pack: copy-paste prompts that turn a free AI account into an adversarial first reader of any privacy policy.
Plain-language explainers
- What "de-identified" student data actually means
- "We never sell your data": it depends what "sell" means
- The bankruptcy clause: what happens to student data when a platform folds
- AI training clauses: is your students' writing training someone's model?
- Does FERPA protect your students' data? For IECs, mostly no
- What SOC 2 does and does not tell you about student data
- Does deleting an account actually delete student data?
- How do free edtech platforms make money from student data?
- Can aggregate data identify individual students?