Compliance // FERPA
FERPA student record data discovery
FERPA protects personally identifiable information in student records. FileSentinel helps schools and staff find that information across Windows files, locally and privately.
Protect student records
Find student PII in your files
FERPA protects the personally identifiable information in education records. On staff and faculty machines, that information ends up in gradebooks, rosters, scanned forms, and email exports far from any official system of record.
FileSentinel scans your files for the identifiers that make a record personally identifiable, names paired with student or ID numbers, dates of birth, and contact details, scoring each so genuine student data stands out.
Student PII
What FileSentinel surfaces
| Type | Examples |
|---|---|
| Identifiers | Names, student IDs, dates of birth |
| Government IDs | SSNs on older records and forms |
| Contact data | Addresses, emails, phone numbers |
| Scanned forms | PII read from images and PDFs via OCR |
On-device for schools
Discovery that respects student privacy
Checking for student data should not mean sending it to a cloud service. FileSentinel runs locally on each machine, so the discovery step keeps education records on the device where they already sit.
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Questions & answers
FAQ
Does FileSentinel make my school FERPA compliant?
It supports finding and cleaning personally identifiable information from student records on Windows machines, which helps with FERPA’s protection expectations but is not the whole of a compliance program.
Can it read scanned student forms?
Yes. With OCR, FileSentinel reads text inside scanned forms and image PDFs, catching PII captured as an image.
Is student data uploaded during scanning?
No. FileSentinel scans entirely on-device with no uploads.
Can staff run it themselves?
Yes. It is a single Windows app from the Microsoft Store that staff can run on their own machines without specialist setup.
Get FileSentinel
FERPA Student Record Data Discovery
Install FileSentinel from the Microsoft Store and scan your files for sensitive data, all on your Windows PC with nothing uploaded.