Welcome to Data Privacy Month 2019

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January 28 marks international Data Privacy Day. Throughout the months of January and February, the higher education community takes the opportunity to discuss privacy issues and share useful resources with students, faculty, and staff.

Stay Safe Online

Data Privacy Day, observed annually on January 28, is part of a global privacy awareness and education effort led by the National Cyber Security Alliance. Since 2012, EDUCAUSE has participated in Data Privacy Day with the higher education community and other Data Privacy Day champions.

Throughout January and February 2019, the EDUCAUSE Cybersecurity Program will focus on sharing tips, tools, and best practices that help our constituents respect individual privacy, safeguard institutional data, and establish trust. Some of our activities this month include:

If you are a campus privacy professional responsible for developing privacy awareness activities or events, we offer the ideas below. These suggestions are meant to be appropriate for all higher education community members—students, faculty, and staff—during Data Privacy Day, Data Privacy Month, and throughout the year as part of a privacy awareness program.

We hope these ideas will help get you started! Please don't forget to share your plans and lessons learned with our EDUCAUSE Privacy Community Group.

Finally, EDUCAUSE is a proud Data Privacy Day Champion. We encourage colleges and universities to join us by signing up as a champion online—more than 80 joined us as champions in 2018. There is no financial requirement, and it signals that your institution is committed to raising privacy awareness.


Valerie M. Vogel is Interim Director of the Cybersecurity Program at EDUCAUSE.

© 2019 Valerie M. Vogel. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.