UW-Madison, constrained by state and federal regulations, must provide a student's name, address and other personal data to any company that wants it, officials said Wednesday.
Some companies use the data for scams or doubtful business practices, but the university must legally provide it if asked.
The businesses must pay a processing fee, but students do have several ways to stop it from happening, said Registrar and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Staff Joanne Berg.
Berg said the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protects data such as grades, class schedule and medical history. However, information such as e-mail address, home address, birth date, telephone number and more is considered public or directory"" information under FERPA.
""A credit-card vendor, [even one] of these big national clearinghouses of student information, [if they] ask us for a list of student information, we legally have to give it to them,"" Berg said.
University officials charge businesses $90 per request. Berg said the fee covers the labor costs of compiling the data and no profit is made from it.
She said the reality is ""it's out of our control once we release it.""
The company American Student List LLC, which claims access to ""100 million individuals in the youth market"" on its website, bought data on every student's home address, according to Berg.
This data was later sold to the company College Financial Advisory, which sent out official-looking letters to the addresses seeking $49 to help students with financial aid, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
American Student List and College Financial Advisory did not return calls as of press time.
According to Louise Robbins, UW-Madison director of library and information studies, the directory data is like phone-book information, but companies have an advantage in this case because the list already exists without compiling it themselves.
""I think the company is totally unethical,"" Robbins said.
Students can make their e-mail and home address private by using access tabs in the MyUW web portal. Students can also make information not protected by FERPA private by accessing the Office of the Registrar's website, www.registrar.wisc.edu.
