Visual Classrooms Privacy Policy
Effective Date: October 23, 2018.
Welcome to Visual Classrooms!
We know that you care how information about you is used and shared, and we appreciate your trust that we will do so carefully and sensibly. This Privacy Policy discloses the privacy practices and policies of Visual Classrooms, Inc. (“Visual Classrooms”, “we”, “us” or “our”) for int.erlace.com, erlace.com, il-demo.com and its sub-domains (the “Website”) and all related tools and services, including any downloadable applications, we make available to you from time to time (the “Services”). The Services include our online platform for enabling teachers (“Teachers”) and educational content publishers (“Publishers”) to provide students (“Students”) with enhanced educational functionality using content supplied by such teachers and/or publishers.
This Privacy Policy covers information that we collect through the Website and our Services, as well as information that we collect about you when our Services are used. This policy does not apply to the practices of companies that Visual Classrooms does not administer, including Publishers, or to individuals that Visual Classrooms does not employ. Visual Classrooms is not responsible for how Publishers or Teachers collect or use information when Students interact with them. You should always review, and if necessary adjust, your privacy settings on any applicable Publisher’s websites and any other third-party websites and services that you connect to in connection with our Services.
Notice of Information We Collect And How We Use It.
Our primary purpose in collecting Personal Information (as defined below) is to provide you with a safe, smooth, efficient, and customized experience using our Services. This allows us to provide services and features that most likely meet your needs, and to customize our Services to make your experience easier and more productive. "Personal Information" means information that specifically identifies an individual (such as a name, address, or e-mail address, etc.) or other information about that individual that is directly linked to Personal Information. Personal Information does not include "aggregate" information, which is data we collect about the use of our Services. We collect and store information, including Personal Information, that you provide to us when registering or when using the Services. Some such information is required in order for you to register as a user of our Services. You can choose not to provide us with certain information, but by doing so, you may not be able to take advantage of many of our features and functionality. We use Personal Information to deliver the Services to you, to improve the delivery of our Services, including advertising, and to develop analytics and aggregated data that allow us and our partners to improve our Services and correspond with you.
We also collect and store non-personally identifiable information that is automatically generated when you use the Services. We use this information to do internal research on our users’ demographics, interests, and behavior to better understand, protect and serve you and our community.
In general, our collection and use of information is as follows:
Visual Classrooms collects Personal Information you knowingly choose to submit to us during registration, such as your name, and email address, which we use for the following general purposes: identification and authentication of a user, improvement to the Services, contact, research, and reporting of aggregated, anonymous data.
Visual Classrooms automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, cookies, and the pages you request. IP addresses are automatically reported by your browser each time you view a web page. Your IP address is stored by Visual Classrooms when you register with Visual Classrooms. IP addresses may be used for various research purposes, and/or delivering unique functionality to our service.
Cookies
By using our Services, you indicate your consent for Visual Classrooms and our affiliates to send cookies to your computer in order to uniquely identify your browser and improve the quality of our services; you may turn off cookies in your browser though, in doing so, some or all of our Services may not work. A “cookie” is a piece of alphanumeric data stored on a visitor’s hard drive that enables us to improve your access to our Website and identify repeat visitors to our Services. We use the non-personally identifiable information, such as your browser version, IP address, referring domains, pages visited, your mobile carrier, device and application IDs, the nature of your use of the Website and cookie information, to improve our Website delivery, including advertising, and to develop analytics and aggregated data that allow us and our partners to utilize our Service and reach out to you via our Services or otherwise. If you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by Visual Classrooms, or by any other website, you can do this through your browser settings.
Log Files
Like many websites, we may automatically gather certain information about our Website traffic and store it in log files. This information includes Internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, Internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, operating system, date/time stamp, and clickstream data. We use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the Website, to track users’ movements around the Website and to gather demographic information about our user base. We may link this automatically collected data to Personal Information. IP addresses may be tied to Personal Information to troubleshoot access issues and ban users by IP address from certain communities upon appropriate request.
Clear Gifs (Web Beacons/Web Bugs)
We may employ, and our third party advertising partners may employ, a software technology called clear gifs, also referred to as web beacons or web bugs, that help manage content on the Site by tracking what content is effective. Clear gifs are tiny graphics with a unique identifier, similar in function to cookies, and are used to track the online movements of Web users. In contrast to cookies, which are stored on a user’s computer hard drive, clear gifs are embedded invisibly on Web pages and are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. We tie the information gathered by clear gifs to our customers’ personally identifiable information.
Information We Collect To Respond To Your Choices and Requests
Registration
In order to use many of our Services, you must first complete the registration form and provide an email address and password (“Login Credentials”). During registration, you are required to complete the registration form and create a user name and password and are required to give truthful contact information (such as name and email address) in accordance with our Terms of Service. We use this information to contact you about the Services in which you have expressed interest.
User Profile
Upon registering on our Website, a user profile may automatically be created for you.
Communication from Us or our Services
When you send email or other communications to Visual Classrooms, we may retain those communications in order to process your inquiries, respond to your requests and improve our Services. When you send and receive messages we may collect and maintain information associated with those messages.
Service-Related Announcements
We will send you strictly service-related announcements on rare occasions when it is necessary to do so. For instance, if our Service is temporarily suspended for maintenance, we might send you an email. Generally, you may not opt-out of these communications, which are not promotional in nature. If you do not wish to receive them, you have the option to deactivate your account.
Customer Service
Based upon the Personal Information you provide us, we will send you a welcoming email to verify your username and password. We will communicate with you in response to your inquiries, to provide the services you request, and to manage your account. We will communicate with you by email or telephone, in accordance with your wishes.
Conditions Under Which We Share Information
We may share certain Students’ personal information with Teachers and Publishers, where such Student chooses to join a student group and participate in an activity provided by or for such Teacher or Publisher. We may also share certain of a Teacher’s personal information (such as name and school name) with Students who join a student group provided by or for such Teacher. Further, we may share aggregated demographic information about our user base with our partners. This information does not identify individual users. We may use and publicize aggregate information in any manner that does not identify you, without your consent.
We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your Personal Information without your consent. However we may share your Personal Information in situations described below:
- We may share your User Profile information and certain other Personal Information with Publishers and Research Partners to make your use of their content more seamless, but only if you have participated in activities created by or for that Publisher or Research Partner.
- We may collect and share Personal Information made available by users in Public Areas.
- We may release your Personal Information to authorized agents who are employed by us to perform tasks on our behalf and need to share information with them to provide products, services and offers to you.
Third Party Advertisers
The ads appearing on our Services, if any, are delivered to users by our advertising partners. We share Website usage information about users with our advertising partners for the purpose of targeting our Internet banner advertisements on our Website. Our advertising partners may use cookies and clear GIFs on our Services, which allows them to recognize a user’s cookie when a user visits the Website or Services. The information that our advertising partners collect and share through this technology is not Personal Information.
Choice and Opt-out
We provide you the opportunity to ‘opt-out’ of having your Personal Information used for certain purposes, when we ask for this information. For example, if you purchase a product/service but do not wish to receive any additional marketing material from us, you can indicate your preference on your profile account page.
Access to or Changing Your Information
If your Personal Information changes, or if you no longer desire our Service, you may correct, update, delete or deactivate it by emailing our customer support at support@visualclassrooms.com.
Information Security
Visual Classrooms is committed to protecting the security and privacy of your information stored by us. Visual Classrooms uses SSL (Secure Socket Layer) encryption when transmitting certain kinds of information. An icon resembling a padlock is displayed in the title bar of most browsers during SSL transactions. All data gathered on our Website is stored by us in a secure, password protected database. Only we and our hosting provider have access to this database. We will protect Personal Information by reasonable security safeguards against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.
Family Education Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA)
In the United States, the Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C. § 1232(g), restricts the disclosure of personally identifiable information from a student’s education records, unless an exception applies. Visual Classrooms’s data protection and privacy policies and practices comply with FERPA and other applicable federal and state education privacy laws.