Thank you for the insightful comment. While there's similar concerns for health, I think financial circumstances are somewhat different. Few people have any in

Thank you for the insightful comment. While there's similar concerns for health, I think financial circumstances are somewhat different. Few people have any interest in finding out "who that person with cancer in that small town is", but "who is that unknown multi-millionaire in my parents' village" might be more tempting. There's no political issue around individual health issues, but individual wealth is very political. I can definitely understand why someone wouldn't want identifiable information about their personal wealth given to third parties, especially not to US universities, which have a tendency to be rather left-wing and full of ideas of undeserved privilege that many don't share and would not feel comfortable knowing that their private information is shared with them. An angry research or student taking to Twitter to call out the evil capitalists isn't that crazy of an idea.