Effective as of August 7, 2021
Writable, Inc”. (“Writable” or “we”) provides this Privacy Policy to inform you of our policies and procedures regarding the collection, use and disclosure of personal information we receive from users of www.writable.com (the “Site”) and our application located at app.writable.com for mobile devices and tablet computers (the “Application”). This Privacy Policy applies only to information that you provide to us through the Site and Application. Unless otherwise defined in this Privacy Policy, terms used in this Privacy Policy have the same meanings as in our Writable Terms of Service, accessible at www.writable.com/terms-of-service.
Our Commitment
Writable is committed to the privacy of educators and students. As a team of technologists and former teachers, our vision is to make writing easier for teachers and more successful and motivating for a new generation of writers. We respect writing and feedback as ultimate forms of personal expression and our aim goes beyond compliance. We never sell or share your personal data, and we collect as little data as possible to run the Writable service.
We abide by education policies in privacy-forward states like California and New York and support national educational privacy leaders such as the Student Data Privacy Consortium and the Student Data Privacy Pledge 2020. To see a growing list of districts and states where Writable has active SDPA agreements, click here. Contact us at privacy@writable.com with questions about customized privacy or data security needs.
This Privacy Policy may be updated from time to time. If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we send a notice to the email address we have on file for the account holder, which may include a Student’s Teacher or School. For material changes regarding use or collection of data, we will provide choices and additional information regarding the collection of such data before it is used in any manner inconsistent with the terms initially provided to users. Except as otherwise provided in this Privacy Policy, any changes to this Privacy Policy will be effective immediately for new users of the Service (as defined below). You are responsible at all times for providing to us your most current email address.
Information Collection and Use
Our primary goals in collecting information are to provide and improve our Site and Application, services, features and content (together, the “Service”) and to enable users to enjoy and easily navigate the Site and Application. We do not sell your Personal Information.
Children’s Personal Information
If you are a Minor Student, you may only use this Service and disclose personally identifiable information if you have been given access to the Services by your Teacher or your School or School District. We collect only the minimal amount of personally identifiable information from Students (including Minor Students) to create accounts on our Service: we ask Students to provide a unique username or similar login from a third-party site such as Google, their full name, a password, and the unique access code or roster access they have been given by their Teacher to connect with a class. In addition to the information entered by the Student, we automatically collect some information from their use of our Service as set forth in the “Information Collected Automatically” section below, some of which may be considered personally identifiable information. Any information collected from a user that is considered personally identifiable information of a Minor Student is hereinafter referred to as “Minor Student Personal Information”. If you are under the age of 13, please do not send any Minor Student Personal Information about yourself to us unless you are using the Service as instructed to do so by your Teacher or School or unless we request such information from you when you sign up for the Service. In the event that we learn that we have collected Minor Student Personal Information from a Minor Student without proper authorization of his or her Teacher, Parent or School Administrator, or if we learn that a Minor Student has provided us Minor Student Personal Information beyond what we requested when he or she signed up for the Service, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. If you believe that a Minor Student may have provided us Minor Student Personal Information beyond what is requested when signing up for the Service, or that a Student is not properly authorized to use the Service, please contact us at privacy@writable.com.
Hereinafter, references to “Personal Information” shall apply to personal information that is not Minor Student Personal Information. References to “Minor Student Personal Information” shall only apply to personal information of a Minor Student collected from use of the Service. General references to “information” shall apply to all users.
If you are a Student who was given access to the Service by your Teacher or your School or School District, this Privacy Policy does not govern how your School might collect, use, or disclose your Personal Information or Minor Student Personal Information. We are not responsible for your School’s collection, use, or disclosure of your personal information or information shared at your School’s request. Please contact your school to better understand your School’s privacy practices.
Personally Identifiable Information
In the course of using the Service, we may ask you to provide us with, or grant us access to, or permission to obtain, certain personally identifiable information that can be used to contact or identify you. Personally identifiable information may include, but is not limited to, your name, email address, and profile photograph (“Personal Information”).
What do we collect?
How do we use the information we collect?
Cookies and Other Similar Technologies
Like many websites, we may use various technologies to collect and store information when you visit our Service including, clear GIFs (also known as “web beacons”), “tags”, “scripts”, and “cookies”. Like many services, we use these technologies to tailor the Service for you, and to help the Service work better for you – for example, by remembering your language preferences. We use cookies for two purposes. First, we utilize persistent cookies to save your login information for future logins to the Site. Second, we utilize session ID cookies to enable certain features of the Site, to better understand how you interact with the Site and to monitor aggregate usage by Writable Users and web traffic routing on the Site. Unlike persistent cookies, session cookies are deleted from your computer when you log off from the Site and Service and then close your browser. You can instruct your browser, by changing its options, to stop accepting cookies or to prompt you before accepting a cookie from the websites you visit. If you do not accept cookies, however, you may not be able to use all portions of the Application or all functionality of the Service. A Web Beacon is an electronic image, often a single pixel, embedded on web pages. Web Beacons are ordinarily not visible to users. Web Beacons allow us to count the number of users who have visited certain pages of the Site and Application, to deliver branded services and to generate statistics about how our Site and Application used.
A cookie is a small file containing a string of characters that is sent to your computer when you visit a website. When you visit the site again, the cookie allows that site to recognize your browser. Cookies may store user preferences and other information. You can configure your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, some website features or services may not function properly without cookies.
Phishing
Identity theft and the practice currently known as “phishing” are of great concern to Writable. Safeguarding information to help protect you from identity theft is a top priority. We do not and will not, at any time, request your credit card information, login information, or national identification numbers in a non-secure or unsolicited e-mail or telephone communication. For more information about phishing, visit the Federal Trade Commission’s website.
Information Sharing and Disclosure
We neither rent nor sell your Personal Information or Minor Student Personal Information to anyone. However, we share your Personal Information and Minor Student Personal Information in personally identifiable form as described below.
Compliance with Laws and Law Enforcement. Writable cooperates with government and law enforcement officials and private parties to enforce and comply with the law. We will disclose any information about you to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe to be required by a warrant or subpoena), to protect the property and rights of Writable or a third party, to protect the safety of the public or any person, or to prevent or stop activity we may consider to be, or to pose a risk of being, illegal, unethical or legally actionable activity.
Business Transfers. Writable may sell, transfer or otherwise share some or all of its assets, including your Personal Information and Minor Student Personal Information, in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of assets or in the event of bankruptcy, in which case the company receiving the Personal Information and Minor Student Personal Information would be obligated to follow this Privacy Policy.
Reviewing, Changing, or Deleting Your Information
As a parent, school or school district, you can request to review, correct, update or have deleted the Personal Information of your Students (including, for the avoidance of doubt, the Minor Student Personal Information of your Minor Students) from our database by writing to us at privacy@writable.com. Please include your name, relationship to the Student, email address and a telephone number where we can reach you. To protect such Student’s privacy and security, we will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before granting you access to the personal information that we collect and maintain about such Student. Please see the “Student Data” section of our Terms of Service for more information regarding our warranties for Minor Student Personal Information.
We will retain Personal Information of a Student (including, for the avoidance of doubt, the Minor Student Personal Information of a Minor Student), including after the school term in which the Student uses the Service, for only as long as is reasonably necessary to fulfill the purpose for which the information was collected. Generally, unless a legal request has been made for a user’s personally identifiable information, we do not retain and will delete or anonymize personally identifiable information in a Member’s Account within a reasonable period after we are informed the Account will no longer be used or that these Terms of Service have been terminated by you, or if an Account becomes inactive and we are unable to contact the relevant user, their school or school district. We may use aggregated and anonymized information derived from your personally identifiable information after you update or delete it, but not in a manner that would identify you personally.
If you would like us to delete your account in our system, please contact us at privacy@writable.com with a request that we delete your Personal Information or Minor Student Personal Information from our database. We will use commercially reasonable efforts to honor your request. To protect the account holder’s privacy and security, we will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before deleting your account. However, your writing samples and any reviews or comments on other writings samples that you submit when you interact with the Service will remain stored with Writable and viewable through the Service, provided that your username and other personally identifiable information will not be associated with any such writing sample and/or reviews. Additionally, we may retain an archived copy of records we have about you as required by law or for legitimate business purposes.
Security
Writable is very concerned with safeguarding your information. We employ commercially reasonable security measures designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of personal information against risks through the use of administrative, technological, and physical safeguards, including encryption. Do not provide your personal information if you are concerned with its disclosure.
We will make any legally required disclosures of any breach of the security, confidentiality, or integrity of your unencrypted electronically stored “personal data” (as defined in applicable state statutes on security breach notification) to you via email or conspicuous posting on this Site and Application in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, insofar as consistent with (i) the legitimate needs of law enforcement or (ii) any measures necessary to determine the scope of the breach and restore the reasonable integrity of the data system.
Writable may rely on one or more subcontractors or subprocessors to perform the Service. Upon request, Writable agrees to share with any authorized Parent or School the names of subcontractors that have direct access to Student Data made available by you. All subcontractors and successor entities of Writable will be subject to the protections for Student Data set forth in this Privacy Policy and Writable’s Terms of Service.
International Transfer
Your information may be transferred to—and maintained on—computers located outside of your state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the privacy laws may not be as protective as those in your jurisdiction. If you are located outside the United States and choose to provide information to us, Writable transfers Personal Information or Minor Student Personal Information to the United States and processes it there. Your consent to this Privacy Policy followed by your submission of such information represents your agreement to that transfer.
Do Not Track
We do not behaviorally target advertising to users on our Sites using Personal Information or Minor Student Personal Information.
We do not track users over time and across third party websites to provide targeted advertising and therefore do not respond to Do Not Track (DNT) signals. For more information on “do not track”, please visit www.allaboutdnt.org.
Links to Other Websites and Services
Our Site and Application contain links to other websites, online services or applications (collectively, “Third Party Services”). If you click on a link to a Third Party Service, you will be directed to that third party’s website, online service or application. The fact that we link to a Third Party Service is not an endorsement, authorization or representation of our affiliation with that third party, nor is it an endorsement of their privacy or information security policies or practices. We do not exercise control over Third Party Services. Such Third Party Services may place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data or solicit personal information from you. Other websites, online services and applications follow different rules regarding the use or disclosure of the personal information you submit to them. We encourage you to read the privacy policies or statements of the other Third Party Services you visit.
Contacting Us
If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, please contact Writable’s Chief Privacy Officer at privacy@writable.com or 2625 Middlefield Road, Ste 470, Palo Alto, CA 94306.