E-mail Accounts and Communication

E-mail Accounts and Communication

University of Northwestern – St. Paul’s assigned e-mail account is the institution’s official and primary means of communication among students, faculty, staff, and Northwestern administration.

Regarding e-mail communication, Northwestern must ensure it takes reasonable steps to ensure student privacy. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA; para. 99.31[c]), states, “An educational agency or institution must use reasonable methods to identify and authenticate the identity of parents, students, school officials, and any other parties to whom the agency or institution discloses personally identifiable information from education records.” As such, since Northwestern owns and maintains each user's Northwestern e-mail account, Northwestern can verify for whom the account was set up and can authenticate who will be accessing and using the account, thus, helping to ensure FERPA compliance. Using personal e-mail accounts (e.g., Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.) does not help meet FERPA compliance since such personal accounts are not set up by Northwestern and since these accounts could be in use by individuals other than the student (e.g., family shared personal e-mail accounts, etc.).