There are a couple of specific laws in the U.S. related to privacy. One is HIPAA, which is on medical privacy. It was a major issue before we had the Affordable Care Act, because if insurance companies found out you had a particular disease, they would bar you from having insurance, or employers wouldn't hire you because you would be more expensive, that type of thing. It's less of an issue now.
There are also very strict laws around student data privacy. With elementary and high school students, you really can't reveal anything about them. That doesn't mean that data should not be shared among people who are authorized to use and see the data. For instance, there's one initiative we're working on now. In school, one of the best indicators that there's a problem is, for example, if a second-grader doesn't show up at school, and they're not sick, chances are, especially in low-income communities, the family has a problem of one sort or another. What will happen is the child won't show up. Someone from a social service agency will visit him. They'll maybe interview the family for 15 or 20 minutes, and make a decision whether the child should stay in the family or not, that type of thing. They have almost no data about the kid. They don't have any attendance data, grades data. They don't know whether the mother is in a drug- or alcohol-treatment program. They don't know whether the father is there, or if the father is there, whether he has post-traumatic stress syndrome from being in Iraq or Afghanistan, or something like that.
Compare that with a situation where you're driving your car with a broken tail light and you get pulled over by a motorcycle policeman. The policeman takes your wallet, walks back to his motorcycle, and checks you against 64 different databases. Why can't we serve children in the same way and share data privately among people dealing with low-income kids to try to improve their lives?
There are situations where you obviously don't want to share that data with the public, but you do want to share it with agencies, with teachers, with principals so they can help families develop.