language: en · status: in-force · last checked: 2026-10-08

Maine — Student Information Privacy Act (20-A M.R.S. §§951–953)

Title 20-A, chapter 13 of the Maine Revised Statutes, enacted by PL 2015, c. 256 (a non-emergency law of the 127th Legislature's First Regular Session, whose general effective date was 15 October 2015) and amended by PL 2017, c. 288. The enacting chapter's transition section (not codified, so not reproduced here) gave operators already under a signed, written contract with a school, teacher or local educational agency until the beginning of the 2016-17 school year to comply. A SOPIPA-model operator statute with three distinctive features: its prohibitions yield to "explicit written or electronic consent from a student's parent or an eligible student"; its definition of targeted advertising expressly includes contextual advertising and single-query advertising; and deletion on a school's request has a fixed 45-day deadline.

Applicability to EdTech

• Who is bound. An "operator" is any entity other than the department, school administrative unit or school that operates an Internet website, online service, online application or mobile application with actual knowledge that it is used for, and was designed and marketed for, kindergarten to grade 12 school purposes, and collects, maintains or uses student personally identifiable information in digital or electronic form (§952(4)). The test is "used for", where the Nebraska, Kansas, Hawaii and New Hampshire definitions in this corpus say "used primarily for".
• Student data includes e-mails, text messages, documents, search activity, photos, voice recordings and geolocation information (§952(6)(A)(14)).
• Contextual advertising counts. "Targeted advertising" includes "contextual targeted advertising that is based upon factors, including, but not limited to, the central theme of an Internet website, the student's recent browsing history, the student's language and the student's location" (§952(8)).
• Service providers. Disclosure to a service provider requires that the operator contractually limit it to the contracted service, require it to impose the same restrictions on its own service providers, and require reasonable security (§953(1)(D)(6)).
• 45-day deletion on a school's or school administrative unit's request (§953(2)(B)).

Contents

Key obligations at a glance

• Without explicit parent or eligible-student consent, no targeted advertising, no profiling except for K–12 school purposes, no sale, and no disclosure of student personally identifiable information except as listed — §953(1).
• Reasonable security procedures and practices — §953(2)(A).
• Delete student data within 45 days of a school's request — §953(2)(B).
• Permitted uses: maintaining and improving the service, adaptive learning, recommendation engines, legal compliance — §953(3)(B).

Enforcement

The chapter sets no penalty and names no enforcing authority (§953).

Licence

The corpus reproduces 20-A M.R.S. §§951–953 verbatim from the Maine Office of the Revisor of Statutes' statute pages, with each provision's printed session-law credit and each section's SECTION HISTORY.

Statute text enacted by a state legislature is outside copyright under the government edicts doctrine. In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255 (2020) (slip opinion, read 2026-10-01), 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 applied the doctrine to an arm of the legislature as well as to legislators: "Because Georgia’s annotations are authored by an arm of the legislature in the course of its legislative duties, the government edicts doctrine puts them outside the reach of copyright protection."

The statute pages (legislature.maine.gov — 20-A §953, read 2026-10-08) carry no copyright notice; their footer states that "The Revisor's Office cannot provide legal advice or interpretation of Maine law to the public."

Conditions: none attach to the statute text. The corpus nonetheless names the official source in its Sources section and in each fact document's {.meta} provenance lines, and its Meta section describes what it changed (anchors added, nothing reworded).

Related

• California SOPIPA — the model, which Maine extends to contextual advertising
• New Hampshire RSA 189:68-a — the neighbouring SOPIPA-model section
• SDPC Maine state terms — the contract layer Maine districts use with vendors
• COPPA · FERPA — the federal layer

Sources

• Maine Revisor of Statutes — Title 20-A, chapter 13
• Maine Legislature — PL 2015, c. 256 — the enacting chapter, its Sec. 2 transition and its effective-date line ("Effective 90 days following adjournment of the 127th Legislature, First Regular Session, unless otherwise indicated."), read 2026-10-08
• Maine State Law and Legislative Reference Library — Laws of the State of Maine 2015, c. 256 (PDF) — "THE GENERAL EFFECTIVE DATE FOR FIRST REGULAR SESSION NON-EMERGENCY LAWS IS OCTOBER 15, 2015", read 2026-10-08