Privacy Policy

Effective date: 4.10.2023

 

By using or accessing our website or Services in any manner, you acknowledge that you accept the practices and policies outlined in this Privacy Policy, and you hereby consent that we will collect, use, and share your information in the following ways.  If you do not agree to the application of this Privacy Policy, do not access the website, Applications or Services.

Remember that your use of the Drizzle Effect (hereinafter “Drizzle Effect”) Services is at all times subject to the Terms of Use which incorporates this Privacy Policy. Any terms we use in this Policy without defining them have the definitions given to them in the Terms of Use.  The Drizzle Effect Services and website are sometimes referred to herein as the “Applications”.  

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This Privacy Policy applies to the Applications and includes other interactions (e.g. when you create an account within the Applications, purchase or sign up for Services or products, sign up to receive a newsletter, signup to receive updates or notices, open a support ticket, contact us via email or social media) you may have with us.  

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If you have any questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy, please send a detailed message to mary@thedrizzleeffect.com and we will try to resolve your concerns.

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Our Core Commitments

We think these are the most important commitments we can make to you about how we handle personal information, so we put these commitments before anything else in the Privacy Policy.

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Completeness

This Privacy Policy covers all of the categories of data that we collect from individuals, and we do not exclude any categories of collected data from this Privacy Policy. 

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Marketing to Students or Families

Drizzle Effect does not sell student data.  Further, we will not use, sell, share, or disclose personally identifiable information we receive from the Applications to: (a) market or advertise to students or families/guardians; (b) inform, influence, or enable marketing or advertising to students or families/guardians; or (c) develop a profile of a student or family member/guardian, for any commercial purpose.  Data collected is only used for providing or improving the Services.

We will not sell, share or disclose personally identifiable information of teachers or administrators we receive from the Applications to third parties for marketing or advertising purposes. 

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Legal Compliance

As set forth in this section, we comply with the following laws concerning the protection of student personally identifiable information, including educational records: the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (“FERPA”) at 20 U.S.C. 1232g (34 CFR Part 99), Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (“COPPA”), 15 U.S.C. 6501-6506; Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (“PPRA”) 20 U.S.C. 1232h, AB 1584 (codified at California Education Code § 49073.1), and the Student Online Personal Information Protection Act (codified at California Business and Professions Code § 22584 et seq.), and any specific state laws (as applicable to us) protecting student personally identifiable information which are listed in the table at the end of this Privacy Policy as of the date set forth in such table.

If so required for the receipt and/or processing of student data, we shall be considered a School Official as that term is used in FERPA.

As to COPPA or any state law which requires consent or authorization from a parent or guardian for the collection or use of information concerning a student, the parent, guardian, teacher, school or school district, is responsible and liable for fulfilling any applicable consent requirement. 

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Persons Covered by this Privacy Policy

Generally

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This Privacy Policy covers the personally identifiable information and the personal information of anyone who visits our Website or uses our Applications.  More specifically, it covers the personal information of:

• Visitors to our Website or people who correspond with us through our Website outside of our Applications

• Teachers, administrators, parents or guardians who use or manage the use of our Applications

• Students who use our Applications

 

We gather different personally identifiable information and personal information from each of those groups of people, and may handle that personally identifiable information and personal information differently for each group, as we explain below.

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Students / Children

If you are not of legal age to form a binding contract (in many jurisdictions, this age is 18), you may only use the Services and disclose information to us with the express consent of your parent, guardian, school or school district. Please make sure that you have reviewed this Privacy Policy with your school, school district, parent or legal guardian to make sure you understand it.

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We only collect personal information through the Applications from a child under 13 where that student's school, district, teacher, parent and/or guardian has agreed  to obtain legally-adequate consent for that child to use the Applications and disclose personal information to us. 

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No child under 13 may send us any personal information unless they have signed up through his or her school, district, teacher, parent or guardian and such school, district, teacher, parent or guardian has obtained legally-adequate consent for that child to use the Applications and disclose personal information to us. Without legally-adequate consent from a parent, guardian, school, district and/or teacher, we do not wish to receive, and do not knowing collect or use personal information from any person under 13 for any purpose, including our internal operations.  If you are a student under 13, please do not send any personal information to us if your school, district, and/or teacher has not obtained obtain legally-adequate consent for you to do so, and please do not send any personal information other than what we request from you in connection with the Applications. 

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As we explain below, we rely on third party service providers to help us with the provision of the Applications.  We treat all student personal information uniformly, so any consent to our collection and use of student personal information necessarily includes consent to disclosure of personal information to those third-party service providers under the terms of this Privacy Policy.

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If we learn we have collected personal information from a student under 13 without legally-adequate consent from their parent or guardian or their school, district, and/or teacher, or if we learn a student under 13 has provided us personal information beyond what we request from him or her, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that a child under 13 may have provided us personal information in violation of this paragraph, please contact us at mary@thedrizzleeffect.com.

 

Information You Knowingly Provide to Us

Correspondence 

If you correspond with us outside of the use of the Applications through a web form, email or otherwise, we will collect and retain your correspondence like any other ordinary business correspondence, subject to the information retention policies and legal requirements applicable to us and standard in our business.

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Personal Information

In order to provide the Applications we receive and store the personally identifiable information you knowingly provide to us. 

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As part of the registration and account setup process, we require your name, email address, age/grade of student, address and phone number.  

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Billing Information

In order to provide the Applications, we receive and store the personally identifiable information that you knowingly provide to us for billing purposes.

  

As part of the account set-up and billing process in order to purchase goods and/or services, we require submission of your name, title, billing address delivery address, email address, phone number, personal contact details, purchase details and your payment method details (such as a credit or debit card number.

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User Information/Responses

In order to provide the Applications, we receive and store user information that you knowingly provide through our website or other online services. 

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As part of the delivery and improvement of our Applications and Services, you may be asked to respond to inquiries or provide information regarding your use of the site or to provide data that you provide and or post through the Applications.  This may include product, content, files, courses, quizzes, surveys or other content you upload to or create on or via the Applications. 

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Third Party Applications

In order to provide the Applications, we may receive personal data about you from various third-party applications and public sources.  When a Third-Party Application is enabled, we are authorized to connect and access information made available to us in accordance with our agreement with the Third-Party Application (and your submissions to and agreements with this Application).  We do not, however, receive or store passwords for any of these Third-Party Services when connecting and receiving information.  

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Information Collected Automatically

Log Data

Our Services, automatically receive and record some information from your browser or device (“Log Data”), just like all web services have to in order to function.  The Log Data our Services automatically collect may include some personal information, but does not include personally identifiable information.  Log Data includes information like your IP address, the type of browser and/or device you're using to access our Services, the capabilities of that browser or device, and the page or feature you requested. Log Data, together with the information that we collect through the Tracking Mechanisms, comprise “Analytics Data”. As described below under “Use and Sharing of Personal Information: Analytics Data,” we do share the collected Analytics Data (but no personally identifiable information) in a de-identified and aggregated form with third parties for analytics and tracking purposes.

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Tracking Technologies

We, and third parties with whom we interact, including our third-party service providers or business partners, may use cookies, web beacons, and similar technology in connection with your use of the Services (collectively referred to in this policy as “Tracking Mechanisms”). Cookies are small text files that may have unique identifiers, and reside, among other places, on your mobile device or your computer. Web beacons are small strings of code that provide a method for delivering a graphic image on a web page or in an email message for the purpose of transferring data.

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If Tracking Mechanisms are used, they may be used to collect information about you and your use of our Services, such as your browser type, and the date and time of your use. Tracking Mechanisms may also be used in order to help us learn more about how users engage with the Services, enable Applications features and processes (like enabling you to return to password-protected areas of the Applications without having to re-enter your password), provide authentication and security for your use of the Applications, or store your preferences. 

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Specific Service Providers

Our third-party analytics service providers include Google Analytics. For Google’s privacy practices see www.google.com/analytics/learn/privacy.html. To opt out of data recording and analysis by Google Analytics, see https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

 

Disabling Cookies or Web Beacons 

It may be possible to disable cookies through your device settings. Most browsers allow disabling either third party cookies or all cookies. The method for disabling cookies may vary by device, but can usually be found in preferences or security settings. However, doing so may cause portions of the Services to not function, or to function improperly, or otherwise affect your ability to use the Services.  You may also disable web beacons by disabling HTML images in your email program, which may also affect other images in emails you receive. 

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Do Not Track 

The Services will respond to the Do Not Track setting in your browser, and will honor other standard opt-out mechanisms (e.g., browser cookie settings and advertising opt-out cookies).  Further, we do not ourselves use cookies to collect personally identifiable information and track users’ online activities over time (except specifically in the Applications for the purposes we describe above) or across different web sites. However, certain of the third party analytics or advertising providers we use (e.g., Google Analytics) may be able to do so, though we do not have access to or control of that information. For information regarding Do Not Track mechanisms, see http://allaboutdnt.com.

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Use and Sharing of Personal Information

This section explains how we use and share personal information, consistent with our statements above under “Our Core Commitments”.

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To Provide, Maintain, and Improve the Services

We use the information we collect to provide, maintain and improve the Services.  Uses of personally identifiable information for those purposes are:

• To deliver the Applications, including diagnosing and correcting any errors in the Applications.

• To perform the Services per an Agreement between Drizzle Effect and you.

• To process data in accordance with your instructions.

• Only after we have removed any identifying information, we may use collected information for development, research, and/or improvement of the Applications or other educational services or materials we may offer. We may also share aggregated information based on such de-identified (or never-identifiable) information with third parties working with us for development, research, and/or improvement of the Applications or other educational services or materials we may offer.  We don’t share any personally identifiable information or information other than in an aggregated format, with third parties for those purposes.  

 

To Communicate with You

We may communicate with you if you've provided us the means and permission to do so. For example if you've given us your email address:

• For those who have provided their contact information to us through the Website or otherwise outside the Applications, we may email you about the Applications including new features or options in which you may be interested, opportunities to learn about the Applications, whether other teachers or administrators in your school district are using the Applications or are interested in doing so, or to respond to your inquiries.

 

If you do not want to receive communications from us, please indicate your preference by emailing mary@thedrizzleeffect.com or by using an opt-out link in the email.

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Service Providers and Our Affiliates

We engage trusted third-party service providers to work for us in connection with the operation of our Services and our business, in the following roles: hosting of our Website and Applications, payments, error and bug tracking, data storage and analysis, technical and user support, and email delivery.  We may provide those service providers with, or authorize those service providers to access, your personal information, including personally identifiable information.  In certain cases, third party service providers may collect information from you directly on our behalf (for example, web data analytics providers or support desk system providers).

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All third-party service providers we engage will use the information only to provide services to us and will retain and use this information in a manner consistent with Drizzle Effect’s own Privacy Policies.  Our third-party service providers are not allowed to augment, extend, or combine personal information shared with them with information from third party sources.  If we learn that any third-party service provider has misused personal information which we have provided to them or to which we have allowed them access in a manner inconsistent with Drizzle Effect’s Privacy Policy, we will delete that personal information (and potentially all of the personal information) held for us by that third party service provider.

We do not presently share any personal information with any of our affiliates or subsidiaries.

Analytics Data

Drizzle Effect uses the Analytics Data to enable us to figure out how often users use parts of the Services, so that we can customize and improve those Services. As part of our use of such information, we may provide such Analytics Data to our partners (only in a de-identified and aggregated format) about how our users use the Services.  We may link Analytics Data to personal information that we collect through the Services, but we will only use the information in this form internally (for example, to customize your experience), and will not disclose it in linked format to third parties.

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Business Transfers and Delegation

In the event of our acquisition, merger, the sale of our assets, or if we go out of business, enter bankruptcy, or go through some other change of control, we can and will transfer your personal information to the successor to business or assets, but we will not transfer your personal information unless the buyer or acquirer (1) intends to maintain and provide the Applications as a going concern and (2) agrees to honor the terms of this Privacy Policy, including providing notice and an opportunity for you to cease use of the Applications before any changes to the terms of this Privacy Policy take effect.

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Protection of Drizzle Effect and Others

We reserve the right to access, read, preserve, and disclose any information that we reasonably believe is necessary to comply with law or court order; enforce or apply our conditions of use and other agreements; or protect the rights, property, or safety of Drizzle Effect, our employees, our users, or others. If we are required to disclose your personal information by a government or legal request, we will notify you of that request if we are permitted to do so by the law governing that request.

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Security

Your Applications account is protected by a password for your privacy and security, and you select that password, so we encourage you to select a strong password. You should prevent unauthorized access to your Applications account and the personally identifiable information in that Applications Account by selecting and protecting your password and/or other sign-on mechanism appropriately, not sharing those sign-on credentials with anyone, and limiting access to your computer or device and browser by signing off after you have finished accessing your account.

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We endeavor to protect the privacy of your account and other personal information we hold in our records, and we use industry standard data security measures to protect your personal information. This includes: (1) only storing your personal information under our control, (2) implementing physical access controls to those areas where personal information is stored, (3) limiting access to your personal information to only those of our personnel who need to have that access to do their jobs, and (4) encrypting all of your personal information both in transit and at rest. We also regularly conduct audits of our security practices to make sure that they are up to date.  Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee complete security. Unauthorized entry or use, hardware or software failure, and other factors, may compromise the security of user information.

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In the event of an unauthorized disclosure of your personal information, we will provide notice as required by applicable law.

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Retrieving, Changing and Deleting Information

We store Analytics Data and information collected through the Website separately from the information stored in the Applications.  We have no meaningful ability to provide you with information concerning Analytics Data.  For personally identifiable information collected through the Website (e.g., by signing up for a mailing list), please contact us at mary@thedrizzleeffect.com if you would like us to delete that information, or if you would like to know which personal information of yours, we have or have shared with third parties.

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We use technical efforts to ensure the integrity of the personal information we collect and store.  However, because we receive all personal information from you directly, we have no ability to determine the accuracy of that information and rely on you to either correct or inform us of any inaccuracies so that we can correct them.  

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Through your Applications account settings, you may access, and, in some cases, update or delete the personally identifiable information in your Applications account.  

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Parents or guardians may request that we cease collection of personal information about their child.  If you are a parent or guardian and would like to request that personally identifiable information regarding your child be updated or personal information about your child no longer be collected (and/or that it be deleted) and you do not have the ability to do so yourself, please contact us at mary@thedrizzleeffect.com. We will respond to your request within thirty (30) days of our receipt.

You may be able to add or update information as explained above. By filling contacting us at mary@thedrizzleeffect.com, you may request that we delete your Applications account, or provide you with a list of all personal information of yours we have or have shared with third parties. We will respond to your request within thirty (30) days of our receipt.  

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Generally speaking, unless a legal request has been made for a user’s personally identifiable information, we do not retain and will delete personally identifiable information in Applications accounts within a reasonable period after we are informed the Applications account will no longer be used, or if it becomes inactive and we are unable to contact the relevant user.  We may use aggregated or de-identified information derived from your personally identifiable information after you update or delete it, but not in a manner that would identify you personally.

The information you can view, update, and delete may change as the Services change. If you have any questions about viewing, updating or deleting information we have on file about you, please contact us at mary@thedrizzleeffect.com

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United States Operation

As a matter of our practices and policies, we generally adhere to the principles set out the European Union General Privacy Directive, however our Services are operated from the United States, and the privacy laws of the United States may not be as protective as those in your jurisdiction. If you are located outside of the United States and choose to use the Services or provide your information to us, you agree that your information will be transferred, processed, and stored in the United States. Your use of the Services represents your agreement to this practice. For the purposes of the GDPR, we act as a data controller for the personal data which we collect directly from users who interact with us.  We have established an individual within our executive team as our data protection officer, who can be reached at mary@thedrizzleeffect.com

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Changes to this Privacy Policy or our Data Practices

We will alert you to material changes to this Privacy Policy, to the context in which we collect personal information, or to our personal information collection practices, at least 30 days before they take effect. We will also alert you if we become aware of an inconsistency between our data collection practices and our contract with you.  We will provide such notices by placing a banner notice on our website, or by sending you an email.  The notice provided will clearly state that your continued use of our Services indicates your understanding of and consent to any Privacy Policy updates and changes.  We do reserve the right to effect important changes more quickly as needed, as in the case of a requirement for legal compliance, a security threat or other emergency situation, or if we are granting you more rights than you had under the previous version of the Privacy Policy. Those important changes will be effective immediately and notice will still be provided via a banner notice on our site or by sending an email.  Please note that if you've opted not to receive legal notice emails from us (or you haven't provided us with your email address), those legal notices will still govern your use of the Services, and you are still responsible for reading and understanding them.

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Questions; Contacting Us

If there are any questions regarding this Privacy Policy we may be contacted using the information below.

mary@thedrizzleeffect.com