PlumCloud Labs
Nov 17, 20201 min
My son is applying to colleges, and every one of them wants my personal income data for financial aid
From a Data Privacy and Data Security view, it seems flawed
The more personal data a school asks for, the larger its data handling and security costs become
Further, the more it stores, the more lucrative target it is for hackers and data breaches
Yet, Higher Ed wants it all - my family's SSN, tax returns, other holdings, foreign assets - E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G!
Data Protection is non-trivial and even larger tech spenders have a hard time doing it well - so why not minimize the need for doing it?
They are asking for data to verify financial aid eligibility. What if the student admission process was redesigned to just do that?
What if they asked for just 2 data points - Parent's Adjusted Gross Income(AGI) and Total Asset value
At a later stage, a 3rd party (local bank) or on-campus office validates the rest, and the aid can be contingent to verification
A Data Minimization mindset can eliminate this single use data, its related costs and risks
It benefits from economies of scale/scope of a local bank and limits data breach impact
Am I missing something? Also, do you have process with similar inefficiencies?