Education & Privacy Legal Expertise
Amelia Vance, a globally recognized expert in child and student privacy, is the founder and president of Public Interest Privacy Center (PIPC). In that capacity, she created the Student and Child Privacy Center, housed at AASA, The School Superintendents Association. Amelia is also the Co-Chair of the Federal Education Privacy Coalition and an adjunct professor of privacy law at William & Mary Law School. Amelia has worked on student and child privacy with state and local education agencies, vendors, and state and federal policymakers for almost a decade.
Amelia and her team at PIPC have partnered with WestEd to provide student privacy legal expertise. PIPC supports DISC through technical assistance and trainings, stakeholder alerts, creating resources, and legislative analysis, including running DISC’s federal privacy laws and regulations working group.
Amelia has previously provided technical assistance to integrated data system stakeholders on relevant laws, practical implementation options, potential privacy risks and mitigation strategies, internal and external communications that build trust, training staff, and ways to ethically and securely share data. She supports education research organizations in building ethical privacy programs, supporting and providing assistance on projects that are submitted for IRB, legal, and ethical review (both traditional research and UX/UI research), and collaborating to determine the legal, ethical, and technical specifications necessary for integrated data storage allowing research replication and multi-project research initiatives.
As the co-chair of the Federal Education Privacy Coalition, Amelia provides federal student privacy expertise to multiple education membership associations, including AASA, The School Superintendents Association, National PTA, NEA, AFT, CoSN, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities. As the former director of education privacy and technology at the National Association of State Boards of Education, Amelia assisted over 30 states with data governance, state legislative tracking and analysis, educational information and advice on federal and state student privacy laws and regulations, education privacy audits, and trainings. As VP for Youth & Education Privacy at the Future of Privacy Forum, Amelia provided support to any and all stakeholders, tracking the 1000+ student privacy bills introduced at the state and federal levels, creating a database of over 500 student privacy resources, overseeing the Student Privacy Pledge, and working closely with state and local education agency staff to assist with practical implementation of student privacy laws and protections. She has collaborated with CCSSO, ECS, NCSL, the Postsecondary Data Collaborative, EDUCAUSE, WestEd, and numerous other partners on how K-12, higher education, and consumer privacy laws impact data collection, use, and integration, and has written over 30 resources on student privacy.
Amelia has testified before Congress, at FTC Workshops, and before state legislatures. She is currently a member of the Maryland Student Data Privacy Council, and was previously part of the New York State Education Department Data Privacy Advisory Council and the OECD expert group that drafted the new Recommendation on Children in the Digital Environment. She previously taught privacy law (2021) and global privacy and data protection law (2022) at Penn State Law.
Amelia is regularly cited in the press, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Vice News, Marketplace, AP, NBC News, USA Today, Politico, The Atlantic, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Vox, The Tampa Bay Times, The 74 Million, and Education Week.
Prior to entering education policy, Amelia was a legal fellow at the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Family Equality Council, an intern at the White House, the State Department, and the Office of Congressman Sander Levin, and a Field Organizer for the 2008 Obama campaign.
Amelia is a member of the Virginia State Bar and the International Association of Privacy Professionals.
