FERPA and Redaction

A parent requests footage of an incident involving their child. The footage also shows twelve other students.

The requesting parent has a right to their own child's record. They have no right to the other twelve. So the release is not a yes or no decision; it is a redaction job where one person stays visible and everyone else does not.

That is selective redaction, and it is the specific capability the situation demands. Masking every face defeats the purpose of the release; masking none of them discloses twelve other students' records.

• Faces of students other than the subject
• Names spoken in the audio, and in any accompanying report
• Student identifiers — ID numbers, on ID cards visible in frame, in documents
• Identifying features that survive a face redaction, which is why tattoos are a detection class
• Anything on a screen that was shared in a recorded class

Selective redaction keeps one designated person visible while every other face in the scene is masked, tracked through movement and occlusion so the exclusion holds across the whole clip.

FERPA is one of the twelve compliance frameworks with its own detection class set, so a job run against it reports what share of the required classes was actually caught.

Minors are a recurring theme in the underlying deployments: school CCTV, school bus cameras, campus police footage, and incident documentation. The common requirement is the same — protect everyone who is not the subject.

Whether a particular record is an education record, whether an exception applies, and who is entitled to receive it are legal determinations for the institution. The software removes what you tell it to remove and reports what it removed.

Education · CCTV redaction · Face redaction · Review and approval