Re: LUG: The Future of UnWRAP - Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:28:01 -0400

Subject : Re: LUG: The Future of UnWRAP

From : "B. Pike" <bapike@gmail.[redacted]>

Date : Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:28:01 -0400

On Fri, Sep 9, 2011 at 7:02 AM, Matthew Frazier < mlfrazie@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:

If a person has a FERPA privacy block on their account, then their username is considered personal information, and releasing it to an outside party is a federal crime.

In this situation (according to UNC's FERPA training), even the fact that someone is a student is protected information. For example, if a member of the media calls a university and asks if <name> is a student, and <name> has a FERPA block, then the university cannot acknowledge that they have any record of <name>.

Now that I think about it, I wonder how FERPA affects the Hesiod name service, if NCSU is still using that. Hesiod distributes /etc/passwd-type information using DNS, and makes it easy to find out whether a username is valid. I think the user's full name is included. Since NCSU uses names to choose usernames, it would be fairly easy to find out if a particular person has some affiliation with NCSU.

And I wonder what happens if a prominent college athlete has a FERPA block?

Brian

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Re: LUG: The Future of UnWRAP