How does YouTube verify student’s educational status?

SheerID is a data broker company that Google’s YouTube uses to verify student educational status (Google 2025, YouTube Help). SheerID is essentially a data aggregator that combines consumer intelligence feeds from over “200K+ Authoritative Data Sources”. They are monitoring affiliations of “Students, Educators, First Responders, Medical and Military” for their marketing industry focused “Audience Data Platform”. (SheerID Inc. 2025, Pricing.)

For students who are in Europe, SheerID’s educational verification is done via API integration to InAcademia, a data verification service partially funded by the European Union. InAcademia provides real-time identity verification data “for over 17,000,000 students across Europe” (GÉANT VERENIGING 2025, InAcademia, Index). For people who want to verify their identity for using YouTube’s student subscription, InAcademia forwards following to data to the USA based SheerID Inc.: “Affiliation, Pseudonymous transient identifier, Pseudonymous persistent identifier” (GÉANT VERENIGING 2024, InAcademia, Privacy Statement).

What other use cases is that identity data is used for? According to SheerID’s privacy policy, student’s data is potentially used for ““sales”, “sharing”, or “targeted advertising””. They are also sharing data with “public authorities to meet national security or law enforcement requirements.” (SheerID Inc. 2025, Global Privacy Policy.) Good question is whether people wanting a bit cheaper video streaming subscriptions know where their identity data ends up.

References:

  • GÉANT VERENIGING 2024. Privacy Statement. InAcademia. Accessed 28 September 2025. https://inacademia.org/privacy-statement/
  • GÉANT VERENIGING 2025. Index. InAcademia. Accessed 28 September 2025. https://inacademia.org
  • Google 2025. Get a student discount for YouTube Premium or YouTube Music Premium - Computer. YouTube Help. Accessed 28 September 2025. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9158808
  • SheerID Inc. 2025. Global Privacy Policy. SheerID. Accessed 28 September 2025. https://www.sheerid.com/global-privacy-policy/
  • SheerID Inc. 2025. Pricing. SheerID. Accessed 27 September 2025. https://www.sheerid.com/pricing/

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