How parents can help safeguard student data

If you’re a parent, your back-to-school to-do list might include shopping for school supplies, signing up for extracurriculars, or moving your kid into their first dorm room.

As kids head back into the classroom, it’s important for parents to consider privacy and security with so much student data being increasingly collected, stored, and breached. 

Student data breaches

Schools and education technology companies — ed tech for short — collect and store a growing amount of information about students. Much of that information may be sensitive like students’ birth dates, ethnicities, and Social Security numbers.

It’s also common for teachers to use classroom tracking apps to store confidential student details, such as grades or accommodations.

Some of these apps then share that data with third parties, such as advertisers, creating a vulnerability for potential data breaches and exposing minors’ personal information.

In fact, data breaches in the education sector affected over one million victims in 2022, according to research from the Identity Theft Resource Center.

If your child’s personally identifiable information (PII) is exposed, those details could wind up on the dark web where hackers frequently sell off databases of stolen personal information.

Additionally, school districts don’t always have large budgets for cybersecurity. Hackers know this and target schools and ed tech companies specifically looking for student data.

Being minors with unblemished credit also makes students an ideal target. With minimal information such as the last four digits of a Social Security number, a thief may be able to apply for a loan or open up a credit account in a child’s name, then accumulate debt that could go undetected for years.

While parents will discover suspicious activity on their own financial accounts by monitoring bank statements, tax returns, and credit reports, it’s not as common for the same precautions to be taken on behalf of a minor. 

Protect students against child identity theft

You can protect your child’s data while they’re at school and home by: 

• Asking before sharing your child’s personal information. Many application forms for daycares and schools are outdated, requesting sensitive information such as Social Security numbers and physical addresses. Ask your child’s school about why they gather certain types of information, how it’s stored, and what choices are available when it comes to data sharing.

• Monitoring what your kids are doing online, even on school-issued devices. Research from Javelin shows that children with unrestricted and unmonitored internet access are three times as likely to be victimized by identity fraud. Discuss safe internet behavior with your child, monitor what they do online, and understand how they're using apps and websites, even on school-issued devices. Also ask your child’s teacher what choices you have to opt out of certain programs, such as behavior-tracking apps.

• Adjusting the privacy settings on school-issued devices. If your child’s school has given them a laptop or tablet, you may be able to adjust the settings to help minimize the collection of their data. Your options will vary depending on your school district and device, but a good place to start is the device’s settings under privacy and security settings — where you can disable location and ad tracking.

• Considering a security freeze. This takes a fair amount of legwork as you must contact each of the major credit bureaus individually. However, the process is free and prevents someone from opening new accounts in your child's name.

• Adding your child to your family plan. Activate our monitoring tools (instructions below) for all-in-one fraud and identity protection for the whole family.