language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-09-19

Louisiana — Personal Online Account Privacy Protection Act

Chapter 28 of Title 51 (Acts 2014, No. 165). A short chapter with one idea: neither an employer nor an educational institution may make a person hand over the credentials to a personal online account, nor punish them for refusing.

Applicability to EdTech

The educational limb binds the institution, not the vendor — but it constrains what a product may ask for. R.S. 51:1954 forbids an educational institution to request or require a student or prospective student to disclose "any username, password, or other authentication information that allows access to the student's or prospective student's personal online account", and forbids expelling, disciplining, refusing admission or otherwise penalising or threatening to penalise them for refusing. A feature that asks a student to connect or link a personal account by supplying credentials puts the institution operating it in breach, whatever the contract says.

"Educational institution" is drawn very wide — R.S. 51:1952 reaches universities, colleges, junior colleges, academies, elementary and secondary schools, extension courses, kindergartens, nursery schools, school systems, districts and intermediate districts, and business, nursing, professional, secretarial, technical and vocational schools, along with separate schools or departments of any of them.

The account the institution provides is outside the prohibition. The exceptions in R.S. 51:1954 cover an account the institution supplies or pays for, and disclosure in the course of a specific investigation. That is the boundary a district-issued-account product sits on: credentials to the school's own account are fair game; credentials to the student's own are not.

The employer limb is the one that reaches staff-facing features. R.S. 51:1953 runs the same prohibition for employers and prospective employees — relevant to device-management, monitoring and onboarding products used on staff.

No duty to monitor. R.S. 51:1955 disclaims any obligation on an employer or educational institution to search or monitor the activity of a personal online account, and limits liability for failing to do so — worth knowing when a safeguarding product's value proposition is framed as monitoring.

Contents

Licence

The reproduced text is La. R.S. 51:1951 to 51:1955, enacted by the Louisiana Legislature and served by the Legislature on legis.la.gov. No copyright subsists in this text. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020), the Supreme Court held: "Under what has been dubbed the government edicts doctrine, officials empowered to speak with the force of law cannot be the authors of—and therefore cannot copyright—the works they create in the course of their official duties." It went on: "judges—and, we now confirm, legislators—may not be considered the 'authors' of the works they produce in the course of their official duties as judges and legislators. That rule applies regardless of whether a given material carries the force of law." (slip opinion, pp. 1 and 5–6, read 2026-10-01.)

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Related

• La. R.S. 17:3913, 17:3914 — Louisiana's student-privacy pair, with criminal penalties for unlawful disclosure
• Ohio R.C. §§3319.325–3319.327 — the closest analogue in this corpus: a default prohibition on monitoring a school-issued device's location, camera, microphone or keystrokes
• Illinois SOPPA — the other regime binding schools as well as vendors

Sources

• legis.la.gov — La. R.S. 51:1951 through 51:1955