Providing personal information to an education-related Web site may mean you unwittingly give permission to sell that data.
This issue is a hotly contested one in the new arena of online college admissions, according to Jim Wolfston, president of CollegeNET, an Internet company that handles this service for over 380 colleges and universities.
Students can now fill out a college application online. Several Internet companies have sprung up to provide this service for colleges.
How these Internet companies handle all that personal information should be a concern for students and their parents since detailed financial information is regularly required for financial aid purposes.
Web-based admissions applications," Wolfston points out. "'Turn them into "members" and their data will be yours!', I'm told.
This attitude is a travesty. Family income, sexual orientation, a heartfelt essay — these are parts of a person's soul. If and where they go and for how many dollars should be strictly the individual's to clearly decide."
College administrators are be-coming aware of the situation. Virginia Tech's director of undergraduate admissions Karen Torgersen says, "We never shared data when we received paper applications. Why should we change just because the application comes to us over the Web? The vendor we chose to handle our online admissions does not share or sell our applicant data."
Rob Sheinkopf, director of admissions for the University of Illinois at Chicago, points out that federal regulations protect student information only after being accepted into the college.
"This is something all students and their parents should understand. There are Web site operators who will take advantage of this loophole and sell or broker student data."
The Federal Trade Commission recently concluded that legislation to address online privacy is not appropriate at this time. This decision was largely based upon the results of a study by Georgetown Professor, Mary Culnan.
The studies demonstrate that 94 percent of the top 100 sites and 66 percent of random sites visited by consumers have posted some type of privacy disclosure.
The FTC concluded that self-regulation is taking hold on the Internet and that further regulation may not be necessary.
Yet what the FTC fails to mention is that those privacy statements may inform consumers that the Web site operator intends to sell their personal information, said Wolfston: "What we see in many privacy statements is hair-splitting. Some membership agreements and sign-up protocols are carefully crafted to give web site operators claims to the data. Is any site really 'free' if it takes your data?"
Until there are regulations in place to protect consumers' privacy, anybody providing personal information to a Web site should watch out.