US government let Facebook take personal student data

The US Department of Education participated with Facebook in a system that allowed the social media giant to extract personal information from students who used a government website to apply for federal aid.

The system, revealed by the technology-focused news site The Markup, was confirmed by Education Department officials, but only after they initially denied that it had been occurring.

Spokesmen for both the Education Department and Facebook gave limited details of the matter, not addressing questions such as whether the data-sharing arrangement had been explicitly approved by the government.

A leading congressional Republican, however, called the incident a matter of “incompetence” on the part of the Education Department that should weaken public support for a legislative proposal to measure college performance by using government data to track student outcomes in the job market.

“This is the kind of malfeasance that would run rampant if the College Transparency Act were to be passed,” Virginia Foxx, the top-ranking Republican on the House Education Committee, said in response to the Facebook revelation.

The data release affected students who used a website of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, which is the main portal through which students give their family financial information to government agencies and to colleges and universities regardless of whether they are seeking government aid.

The released data – which included full names, email addresses and postcodes – were passed from the Fafsa site to Facebook, even if the students did not have a Facebook account, owing to lines of computer code that are commonly embedded in the non-displayed portions of websites, The Markup found.

The data extraction from Fafsa applicants began as early as January and lasted until late March, The Markup said. Education Department officials denied that it had occurred, then reversed their position after the news site published its findings, calling it an unintended element of an advertising arrangement.

A spokeswoman for Facebook, in response to questions on the matter, issued a statement that generally described the company as taking care to protect personally identifiable information, to restrict adverts aimed at teenagers and to delete information that its systems might improperly collect.

The statement did not explain whether and to what degree those considerations applied in the Fafsa case, but it said the company was “in touch with” Education Department officials “to ensure proper implementation of our tools”.

The College Transparency Act, meanwhile, is part of a years-long battle – with prominent supporters and opponents in both major political parties – over the creation of some type of “unit record” system for tracking long-term student outcomes through governmental employment data.

The current version of the bill was approved in February by the US House of Representatives and has been awaiting action in the Senate. It would create a system to collect individual information that includes names, ages, grades, attendance, race, gender and income levels, and match it over the person’s lifetime with data from federal agencies that include the Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration.

Ms Foxx is among many who agree on the need to compile better data to assess college performance, but she has argued that the job can be done by giving prospective students more general data such as employment and average salaries for graduates of particular academic programmes. Other experts say that college-to-employment realities are far too complicated to be reliably measured without tracking individual pathways, and that unit-record systems can be implemented while fully protecting privacy.

In the absence of progress on a nationwide system, the federal government has been creating partnerships with some individual states to share some of its employment-related individual data. An early leading partner in that regard is Texas, a state led by conservative politicians who have argued that the federal data partnership helps families make better financial decisions about attending college.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com